gleam
To shine softly with light.
- The polished trophies gleamed on the shelf in the afternoon sun.
- We polished the old brass lamp for an hour until it began to gleam like new.
Similar: shine, glow, sparkle
gleam or glisten?
Glisten is the shine of something wet. Gleam is the shine of something clean or polished.
Writers love shining words, and children often use them as if any one will do. Gleam and glisten each have their own job.
Glisten is the sparkle of something wet or oily. Raindrops glisten on the car windscreen, dew glistens on the grass on a cold morning, and a swimmer's arms glisten as she climbs out of the pool. If you see glisten, look for the water.
Gleam is a soft, steady shine, usually from something clean, smooth or polished. Freshly washed windows gleam in the sunshine; polished school shoes gleam on the first day of term. A person's eyes can gleam too, when they have a sudden clever idea.
Both words, side by side
glisten
To shine and sparkle, often because something is wet.
- The morning dew glistened on the spider's web like a string of tiny diamonds.
- After the storm, the wet pebbles glisten along the shoreline like scattered marbles.
Similar: sparkle, shine, gleam
Why it costs marks
In descriptive writing and cloze questions, glisten signals wetness. A child who knows this can use the words precisely in their own writing and can spot that 'the dry sand glistened' does not sound right.
Definitions and example sentences on this page are the ones a child sees inside Wordrealm, taken from our list of over 1,100 words. It is free to browse, with nothing to sign up for.
Sitting the 11+ in Kent, Medway or Buckinghamshire?
Plain-English guides to each test, from the councils’ own pages: Kent Test · Medway Test · Bucks Secondary Transfer Test