shingle

noun

1. 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”

2. A rectangular piece of steel obtained by means of a shingling process involving hammering of puddled steel.
3. 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.”

   “When [these attorneys] were born, in the early decades of the 19th century, being a lawyer meant putting out a shingle and representing your neighbors.”

4. 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.”

5. A punitive strap such as a belt.
6. (broadly)Any paddle used for corporal punishment.
7. (countable, uncountable)Small, smooth pebbles, as found on a beach.

   “And naked shingles of the world.”

   “You need to excavate and remove the topsoil, line the subsoil with a geotextile, then lay and compact hardcore. Follow this with a layer of compacted "hoggin" – compacted clay, gravel and sand. This is then sprayed with hot bitumen, and has a layer of pea shingle rolled into it.”

   “One can't escape the huge nuclear facility at Sellafield (supplier of much of the line's remaining freight traffic), or miss the wild shingle beaches with exposed and precarious bungalows sandwiched between the railway and the shore at Braystones.”

8. (countable, uncountable)A beach or other shore covered with loose, smooth pebbles.

   “Underneath a black cliff where the incoming tide smashed on the shingle, they stumbled upon the mail hood of Hrothgar's murdered vassal.”

verb

1. (transitive)To cover with small, thin pieces of building material, with shingles.
2. (transitive)To cut, as hair, so that the ends are evenly exposed all over the head, like shingles on a roof.
3. (transitive)To increase the storage density of (a hard disk) by writing tracks that partially overlap.
4. (transitive)To hammer and squeeze material in order to expel cinder and impurities from it, as in metallurgy.
5. (transitive)To beat with a shingle.