Ping

How to spell ping

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ping

What does ping mean?

1. nounA short, sharp, high-pitched ringing sound.
2. verbTo make a short, sharp, high-pitched ringing sound.
3. verbTo send someone a quick electronic message or signal.

Ping in a sentence

• noun

  The lift announced each floor with a soft ping.

• verb

  The toaster will ping when the bread is ready.

• verb

  She promised to ping him the address after the meeting.

• noun

  A sudden ping told her the microwave had finished.

• verb

  Small stones began to ping against the windscreen.

• verb

  The manager asked her assistant to ping the team a reminder before lunch.

Where does ping come from?

Language of origin: Other

Ping is an imitative or onomatopoeic word, coined in English in the middle of the 1800s to mimic the short, sharp, ringing sound that a small hard object makes on impact, such as a bullet striking metal or a fingernail tapping glass. It belongs to the same family of sound-words as 'ting' and 'pong', and the rhyming pair 'ping-pong' was registered as a trade name for table tennis in the early 1900s precisely because it captured the back-and-forth click of the ball. Because the word was built directly from a sound rather than borrowed from another language, its spelling has always been simple and phonetic. In the late twentieth century 'ping' gained a technical life in computing, where a small network utility was named after the way sonar sends out a pulse and listens for its echo, and from there it spread into everyday speech to mean sending someone a quick electronic message.

How the word is built

• ping (imitative root: a short, sharp, high-pitched sound)