pinging

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of ping.

   The sonar operator was pinging contacts off the canyon wall.

   Constantly pinging your coworkers can break their focus.

   Note

   One spelling carries every use of the verb: the sharp metallic sound, sonar, the network check, and, more loosely, nudging someone by message to get a reply. With an object it means sending (pinging the server, pinging a coworker). The sound itself and the colloquial "bounce" use stand alone. Once the form names the noise rather than the action, it has become the noun for the sound.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The act of sending a ping, as from a submarine's sonar or across a computer network.

   The sonar's pinging echoed through the hull every few seconds.

   Repeated pinging of the website confirmed the outage.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The metallic ringing sound that a ping produces.

   The constant pinging of sleet against the window made it hard to sleep.

   A rhythmic pinging from the cooling metal filled the garage.

   Similarticking, tapping, clinking, ringing

   Note

   A sound noun that readily takes a plural when the pings come scattered and repeated. Sir John William Kaye, in A History of the Sepoy War in India (1870), writes of "the pingings of the hostile bullets." Fish Tales: The Guppy Anthology (2011) hears the "musical pingings" of slot machines. The singular with "the" suits one continuous run of the sound, such as the pinging of sleet.

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