shingle

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   cover with shingles

   Shingle a roof.

2. 2
   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.

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

3. 3
   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).

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

4. 4
   noun

   A word-based n-gram.

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

Simplified etymology

Shingle in the sense “wooden roofing or wall tile” probably derives ultimately from Latin scandula “split piece of wood.” The seashore sense, recorded from the early 16th century, is an unrelated word of unknown origin. Shingles, the disease, is different again and comes through medieval Latin cingulus “belt, girdle,” referring to its band of blisters.

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.

Topics

External links

• Google Images
• Cambridge Dictionary
• Wiktionary