Other forms: pinned, pins, pinning
A pin is a short piece of wire, sharp at one end with a small head at the other, that holds two things together. New pins in a folded shirt, a pin through a note on a board, a safety pin holding up a strap that has given way.
Pin is a verb as well: you pin a note to the door, pin a badge on a coat, pin somebody against a wall. The four numbers you tap into a cash machine are your PIN, and everyone says PIN number even though the N in it already stands for number. From there the word spreads out — a rolling pin, a pin in a mended leg, the pins you knock down at bowling, and in chess a pin, where a piece cannot move without leaving something bigger exposed behind it. The pattern to learn is pin something to something, and the figurative one worth having is pin your hopes on.
1nounshortA short thin piece of metal with a point at one end, used to fasten things together.~60%
“There is a pin holding the label on.”
2nounpinThe secret number you key in to use a bank card.~16%
“The machine asked for my pin twice.”
3verbplaceTo fasten something in place with a pin, or to hold something so that it cannot move.~19%
“She pinned the notice to the board.”
4nounchessIn chess, a position where a piece cannot move without exposing a more valuable one behind it.~5%
“His knight is caught in a pin.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 156 sentences found in the wild and placed 95 of them on a sense (61 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Old English pinn covered the pin, the peg and the bolt all at once — the point was the point, and the metal was beside the point. Behind it sits a root meaning a protruding object, a pointed peg, a nail. It is a relative of pen, the enclosure, which was built of pegs. And despite how it looks, it has no connection to Latin pinna, the fin or the wing.
Old English
pinn
Middle English
pinne
English, today
pin
Built from
From Middle English pinne, from Old English pinn. From Middle English pinne, from Old English pinn (“pin, peg, bolt”), from Proto-Germanic pinnaz, pinnō, pint- (“protruding point, peak, peg, pin, nail”), from Proto-Indo-European bend- (“protruding object, pointed peg, nail, edge”). Related to pen (“enclosure”). Cognate with Dutch pin (“peg, pin”), Low German pin, pinne (“pin, point, nail, peg”), German Pinn, Pinne (“pin, tack, peg”), bar Pfonzer, Pfunzer (“sharpened point”), Danish pind (“pin, pointed stick”), Norwegian pinn (“stick”), Swedish pinne (“peg, rod, stick”), Icelandic pinni (“pin”). More at pintle.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA