Other forms: rings, ringing, rang, ringed, rung
A ring is a circle — the one on your finger, the one round a planet, the one a spilled glass leaves on a table. It is the shape first, and everything else follows from it or from the sound.
The sound sense is a separate verb with its own forms, and the forms are the difficulty: ring, rang, rung. Ring the bell, the phone rang, the bell has rung. But the shape verb is regular — she ringed the date on the calendar — so the same spelling takes two different past tenses depending on which meaning is in play, which is rare in English and worth knowing. In British English ring also means to telephone: ring me tomorrow. And a boxing ring is square, which is one of the language's better jokes.
1nounringA circle of metal worn on a finger.~31%
“She wears her grandmother's ring on her right hand.”
2verbchimeTo make the sound of a bell.~24%
“The phone rang twice and stopped.”
3verbtelephoneIn British English, to telephone somebody.~2%
“Ring me when you get in.”
4nouncircularA circular shape or mark.~39%
“There was a ring of mud where the tent had been.”
5nounenclosedAn enclosed space for boxing, wrestling or a circus.~2%
“The crowd was on its feet before they reached the ring.”
6nounorganisedAn organised group of criminals.~2%
“Police broke up a smuggling ring in the spring.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 13 sentences found in the wild and placed 12 of them on a sense (1 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ring is a circle, or a sound.
Old English hring meant a circle or a ring, and the sound verb is a separate Old English word, hringan, that happened to be spelled the same. Two words fell together and never came apart, which is why one spelling has two past tenses.
Middle English
ryng
English, today
ring
Built from
From Middle English ryng. From Middle English ryng, from Old English hring (“ring, circle”), from Proto-West Germanic hring, from Proto-Germanic hringaz (“ring”), from Proto-Indo-European (s)krengʰ-, extended nasalized form of (s)ker- (“to turn, bend”). a doublet of rank and rink, as well as indirectly a doublet of range. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA