How can I highlight search terms using animated color change

I have a word cloud and I want to pick a few unique pre-defined words from it and smoothly change their color. Basically I want to do this,

// font color animation

$(".second a").hover(function() {

$(this).animate({ color: "#00eeff" }, 400);

},function() {

$(this).animate({ color: "#FFFFFF" }, 500);

});

but instead of hover being the trigger I just want to have a setTimeout function trigger the change. How can I do that? Any help will be greatly appreciated