Meaning
To send someone a brief electronic message, or to check that they are reachable, usually over chat, text, or email; in workplace speak it simply means get in touch. Informal but fully mainstream in office and tech settings; harmless in tone. Informal but fully acceptable in professional settings; quick and friendly, never offensive. Regional use: General English; strongest in workplace and tech contexts.
Origin
Ping began as an imitation of a sharp ringing or sonar echo, first recorded in 1855, and the submarine-detection sense fed directly into computing: Mike Muuss wrote the ping utility in December 1983 at the US Army Ballistic Research Laboratory to test network reachability, naming it, in his own words, after the sound a sonar makes, inspired by echo-location; Packet Internet Groper was a later backronym he rejected. The utility's habit of probing whether a host is alive supplied the metaphor for checking on a person. Documented history covers the 1855 word and the 1983 tool; the timing of the conversational shift, in which the phrase means message me, is inference, but it plausibly spread with email, instant messaging, and workplace chat, where it is now standard.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- give me a ping
- ping
- ping you later
- pinged
Usage Examples
- Ping me when your flight lands and I will pick you up.
- He pinged the group chat about the schedule change this morning.
- If the build fails overnight, the system pings the on-call engineer automatically.