shingle
/ˈʃɪŋ.ɡəl/ noun, verb
Forms shingles shingling shingled shindle
- noun A small, thin piece of building material, often with one end thicker than the other, for laying in overlapping rows as a covering for the roof or sides of a building.
- noun A rectangular piece of steel obtained by means of a shingling process involving hammering of puddled steel.
- noun A small signboard designating a professional office; this may be both a physical signboard or a metaphoric term for a small production company (a production shingle).
- noun (computational linguistics) A word-based n-gram.
- verb (transitive) To cover with small, thin pieces of building material, with shingles.
- verb (transitive) To cut, as hair, so that the ends are evenly exposed all over the head, like shingles on a roof.
- verb (transitive) To increase the storage density of (a hard disk) by writing tracks that partially overlap.
- verb (transitive, manufacturing) To hammer and squeeze material in order to expel cinder and impurities from it, as in metallurgy.
- verb (transitive) To beat with a shingle.
- noun A punitive strap such as a belt.
- noun (by extension) Any paddle used for corporal punishment.
- noun Small, smooth pebbles, as found on a beach.
- noun A beach or other shore covered with loose, smooth pebbles.
Synonyms
Etymology
From Middle English shyngel, alteration of Old English sċindel, from Proto-West Germanic *skindulā, borrowed from Late Latin scindula, from Latin scandula, from Proto-Indo-European *sked- (“to split, scatter”), from *sek- (“to cut”). Doublet of shindle.
From dialectal French chingler (“to strap, whip”), from Latin cingula (“girt, belt”), from cingere (“to girt”).
From Middle English shingel, chingel, singel (“gravel, pebbles”), cognate with Norwegian Bokmål singel (“pebble(s)”), Norwegian Nynorsk singel (“pebble(s)”), and North Frisian singel (“gravel”), imitative of the sound of water running over such pebbles.
Webster’s 1913
- noun Round, water-worn, and loose gravel and pebbles, or a collection of roundish stones, such as are common on the seashore and elsewhere.
- noun A piece of wood sawed or rived thin and small, with one end thinner than the other, --used in covering buildings, especially roofs, the thick ends of one row overlapping the thin ends of the row below.
- noun A sign for an office or a shop; as, to hang out one's shingle.
- verb To cover with shingles; as, to shingle a roof.
Etymology [Prob. from Norw. singl, singling, coarse gravel, small round stones.]
Etymology [OE. shingle, shindle, fr. L. scindula, scandula; cf. scindere to cleave, to split, E. shed, v.t., Gr. 1. A piece of wood sawed or rived thin and small, with one end thinner than the other, -- used in covering buildings, especially roofs, the thick ends of one row overlapping the thin ends of the row below. I reached St. Asaph, . . . where there is a very poor cathedral church covered with shingles or tiles. Ray. 2. A sign for an office or a shop; as, to hang out one's shingle. [Jocose, U. S.]
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “shingle”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details