Other forms: jingles, jingling
To jingle is to make the small bright ringing that little metal things make when they knock together. Keys on a ring, coins in a jar, the bell on a cat's collar.
Jingle is the sound itself as well — the jingle of keys at the door — and it is the word for the short tune at the end of an advert, the six notes you can still sing years after the shop has closed. Keep it small: a church bell rings or tolls, and jingling belongs to the things that fit in a pocket. The advertising sense is fixed to advertising, so a catchy song on the radio is a tune, and a catchy song selling insurance is a jingle.
1verbjingleTo make the light ringing sound of small metal things knocking together.~18%
“His keys jingle every time he moves.”
2nounmarketingThe short catchy tune written for an advertisement.~72%
“The bank has had the same jingle for thirty years.”
3nounitselfThe ringing sound itself.~10%
“She heard the jingle of coins in his coat pocket.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 97 sentences found in the wild and placed 51 of them on a sense (46 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
jINGLE → jUNGLE
A small monkey runs through the jungle with a string of tiny bells tied round its neck. Every branch it lands on, the whole tree rings.
hooks ontojungle
The verb came first and the noun followed, which is the giveaway: jingle is not named after anything, it is the noise itself. Middle English gyngle was built to sound like what it meant, the same way jangle was.
Middle English
gyngle
English, today
jingle
The verb, which is older than the noun, is from Middle English gyngle. imitative of the sound; compare jangle.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA