shingle

• (UK, US) IPA^(key): /ˈʃɪŋ.ɡəl/

• Audio (Southern England)

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• Rhymes: -ɪŋɡəl

From Middle English shyngel, from Old English sċingul, a late variant of 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.

• shindle

shingle (plural shingles)

Shingle roof

1. 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.
   • 1760, John Ray, Select Remains of the Learned John Ray, M.A. and F.R.S.‎, page 123:

     I reached St. Asaph, a Bishop's See, where there is a very poor Cathedral Church, covered with Shingles or Tiles

2. A rectangular piece of steel obtained by means of a shingling process involving hammering of puddled steel.
3. 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).
   • 2016, Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, Fleet (2017), page 311:

     He [...] hung a shingle as a barber.

   • 2022, Peter S. Canellos, interviewed by Ronald Collins in eGreater than Holmes? The life and legacy of John Marshall Harlan, SCOTUSblog, April 13 2022

     When [these attorneys] were born, in the early decades of the 19th century, being a lawyer meant putting out a shingle and representing your neighbors.

4. (computational linguistics) A word-based n-gram.
   • 1997 September 1, Andrei Z. Broder, Steven C. Glassman, Mark S. Manasse, Geoffrey Zweig, “Syntactic clustering of the Web”, in Computer Networks and ISDN Systems (Papers from the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference)‎, volume 29, number 8, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 1157–1166:

     In the second phase, we produce a list of all the shingles and the documents they appear in, sorted by shingle value.

shingle (third-person singular simple present shingles, present participle shingling, simple past and past participle shingled)

1. (transitive) To cover with small, thin pieces of building material, with shingles.
2. (transitive) To cut, as hair, so that the ends are evenly exposed all over the head, like shingles on a roof.
3. (transitive) To increase the storage density of (a hard disk) by writing tracks that partially overlap.

• hang out one's shingle
• shingler
• shingly
• solar shingle
• w-shingling

• shake
• tile

From dialectal French chingler (“to strap, whip”), from Latin cingula (“girt, belt”), from cingere (“to girt”).

shingle (third-person singular simple present shingles, present participle shingling, simple past and past participle shingled)

1. (transitive, manufacturing) To hammer and squeeze material in order to expel cinder and impurities from it, as in metallurgy.
2. (transitive) To beat with a shingle.

shingle (plural shingles)

1. A punitive strap such as a belt.
2. (by extension) Any paddle used for corporal punishment.

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.

shingle (countable and uncountable, plural shingles)

1. Small, smooth pebbles, as found on a beach.
   • 1867, Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach:

     And naked shingles of the world.

   • 2014 August 24, Jeff Howell, “Home improvements: gravel paths and cutting heating bills [print version: Cold comfort in technology, 23 August 2014, p. P5]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Property)‎:

     You need to excavate and remove the topsoil, line the subsoil with a geotextile, then lay and compact hardcore. Follow this with a layer of compacted "hoggin" – compacted clay, gravel and sand. This is then sprayed with hot bitumen, and has a layer of pea shingle rolled into it.

   • 2022 November 2, Paul Bigland, “New trains, old trains, and splendid scenery”, in RAIL, number 969, page 57:

     One can't escape the huge nuclear facility at Sellafield (supplier of much of the line's remaining freight traffic), or miss the wild shingle beaches with exposed and precarious bungalows sandwiched between the railway and the shore at Braystones.

• shingly

• Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, Springfield, Massachusetts, G.&C. Merriam Co., 1967
• Corpun.com, a specialized website on Corporal Punishments

• English, Hingles, english