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:
"You can find all those fossils just loose, you know, in the shingle there, if you're lucky, and many families do, and I think that's such a wonderful pastime."
From BBC ● Jul. 30, 2026
We hung out an enormous “for sale” shingle and put just about everything on the market.
From Los Angeles Times ● May 6, 2026
For “Over Your Dead Body,” he teams with producer David Leitch, whose 87North shingle specializes in R-rated action-comedies like “Nobody” and “Violent Night.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 24, 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
When they did, Beowulf knelt on the beach and gathered up shingle in his fists and kissed it.
From "Beowulf: A New Telling" by Robert Nye
Forty minutes east of Absolem, I spotted the shingled barn of Bailey’s Orchard, where 79-year-old farmer Rodney Bailey tends dozens of obscure apple varieties including King David, Chenango Strawberry and Black Gilliflower.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 10, 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
The buildings and shingled cottages are bright pastel, the waterfront dotted with cafes and patio umbrellas.
From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 22, 2023
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
Uprooted trees, a telephone pole, and the shingled roof of a small shed floated in the water behind the downed section of the bridge, trapped against the steel girder that now angled into the river.
From "Earthquake Terror" by Peg Kehret
For presentation, gingerly prop the tofu against the pork, shingling it out slightly.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Mar. 11, 2026
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
In addition to potted plants, they have moss-wrapped kokedama, cork-mounted plants, terrariums and shingling plants.
From Seattle Times ● Sep. 9, 2021
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.
