Other forms: singing, sang, sung, sings
To sing is to make music with your voice. Sing a song, sing along, singing in the car.
The past tense is sang and the participle sung, which is one of the last three-form irregulars people still get right. Sing along means to join in. Of a kettle or wires in the wind, sing means to make a high continuous note. In criminal slang, to sing means to inform on somebody. Note singer, singalong; and sing somebody's praises, meaning to say publicly how good they are.
1verbsingTo make music with your voice.~98%
“My grandmother likes to sing while she cooks.”
2verbhighTo make a high continuous note.~2%
“The kettle began to sing as the water came to the boil.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 11 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
sing is a making of music.
Old English singan descends from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to recite or chant, which also gives the Greek omphe, a voice. Song, singer and the German singen are all the same verb unchanged for millennia.
Proto-Indo-European
*sengʷʰ- — to recite, sing
Proto-Germanic
*singwaną — to sing
Proto-West Germanic
*singwan
Old English
singan — to sing
Middle English
singen
English, today
sing
From Middle English singen, from Old English singan (“to sing”), from Proto-West Germanic singwan, from Proto-Germanic singwaną (“to sing”), from Proto-Indo-European sengʷʰ- (“to recite, sing”). Cognate with stq sjunge (“to sing”), West Frisian sjonge (“to sing”), Dutch zingen (“to sing”), German Low German singen (“to sing”), German singen (“to sing”), Danish and Norwegian Bokmål synge (“to sing”), Swedish sjunga (“to sing”), Norwegian Nynorsk, Faroese and Icelandic syngja (“to sing”), Ancient Greek ὀμφή (“voice, oracle”). Česká státní hymna v G.ogg
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA