shingle
1 Americannoun
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a thin piece of wood, slate, metal, asbestos, or the like, usually oblong, laid in overlapping rows to cover the roofs and walls of buildings.
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a woman's close-cropped haircut.
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Informal. a small signboard, especially as hung before a doctor's or lawyer's office.
verb (used with object)
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to cover with shingles, as a roof.
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to cut (hair) close to the head.
idioms
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hang out one's shingle, to establish a professional practice, especially in law or medicine; open an office.
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have / be a shingle short, to be mentally disturbed, mad, or eccentric.
noun
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small, waterworn stones or pebbles such as lie in loose sheets or beds on a beach.
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a beach, riverbank, or other area covered with such small pebbles or stones.
verb (used with object)
noun
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a thin rectangular tile, esp one made of wood, that is laid with others in overlapping rows to cover a roof or a wall
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a woman's short-cropped hairstyle
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a small signboard or nameplate fixed outside the office of a doctor, lawyer, etc
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informal unintelligent or mentally subnormal
verb
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to cover (a roof or a wall) with shingles
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to cut (the hair) in a short-cropped style
noun
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coarse gravel, esp the pebbles found on beaches
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a place or area strewn with shingle
verb
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of shingle1
First recorded in 1200–50; Middle English scincle, sc(h)ingle, shyngle, ultimately from Latin scindula, variant of scandula “lath, shingle” ( Middle English -g- is unexplained); Latin scindula is due perhaps to association with Greek schíza, schídax “piece of split wood, splinter”
Origin of shingle2
First recorded in 1530–40; apparently variant of earlier chingle; further origin uncertain; but compare North Frisian singel “gravel,” Norwegian singel “small stones”
Origin of shingle3
First recorded in 1665–75; from French cingler “to whip, beat,” from German zängeln “to shingle,” derivative of Zange “pincers, pliers”; see also tong
Explanation
A shingle is a thin piece of wood used in making a roof or a signboard outside an office, especially a doctor’s or lawyer's. If you’re opening a business, hang your shingle outside so people can find you. One kind of shingle is a rectangular piece of wood or other material used to make a roof. The other is a type of small sign outside an office that shows someone is ready to see clients, patients, or other types of customers. The word shingle is from the Latin scindere for "to split,” as in splitting wood, and whatever you do with a shingle, it’s a small flat hunk of wood.
Vocabulary lists containing shingle
Learning Down The House: Parts of Your Home
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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Beowulf
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Agents hung up their shingle in even the smallest of towns, becoming part of the community they sold to.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 17, 2026
In prison, he became devoted to working out; after his release, Mr. James hung out his shingle as a personal trainer.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 1, 2026
We arrived, some minutes later, at a shingle beach beside the old fishing village of Audresselles, just south of Cap Gris-Nez.
From BBC ● Jun. 17, 2025
By that time, Emmett’s longtime shingle Emmett/Furla Oasis had collapsed under the weight of millions of dollars of debt to former financiers and co-producers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 16, 2025
If I were to face that fact, possibly I could move on with my life, maybe learn a trade and take pride in my ability to shingle roofs or knock the dents out of cars.
From "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris
At the bar, I built a fantastic $59 meal from the happy-hour menu: hamachi crudo shingled with plums, chicken curry, and truffled brie grilled cheese with mango jam.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 6, 2025
When you imagine a typical American family home, you probably picture something like John Williamson and Sue Spaziani’s house, with its shingled roof and wraparound porch.
From Slate ● Oct. 17, 2024
But sometime over the last few weeks, one snowy owl in particular made a surprise appearance in noticeably less harsh terrain — the shingled roofs and white chimneys of suburban Southern California.
From New York Times ● Dec. 31, 2022
It is a dish of shingled, slow-cooked potatoes pressed into a terrine, then sliced and fried.
From Salon ● Nov. 28, 2021
What you see from the road are the two gatehouses, each a small empty pillbox of a building faced with flagstones and topped, like tiny pagodas, with shingled curving roofs.
From "Farewell to Manzanar" by Jeanne Houston
For presentation, gingerly prop the tofu against the pork, shingling it out slightly.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 11, 2026
Back east on Cape Cod, where once upon a time my shingling trade migrated, the occasional red cedar roof comes along in the wealthiest of ocean-view neighborhoods.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 8, 2024
Top each with two thin slices of ham and the cucumbers, shingling the cucumbers neatly on top of each sandwich.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 13, 2022
Using shingling, we transformed the text of articles in both datasets into a list of tokens, and then turned the list of tokens into a list of n-token sequences called “shingles.”
From New York Times ● Jan. 5, 1458
He heard horses’ hoofs plodding on the road and far-off pounding on wood where a neighbor was shingling a barn.
From "East of Eden" by John Steinbeck
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
