Skip to content
OneKitly

ling

nounnounnouncommon in dialogue

  • United States//lɪŋ//

Any of various codlike saltwater fish often used as food by humans, those of the genus Molva, in the family Lotidae.

noun

  1. 1

    Any of various codlike saltwater fish often used as food by humans, those of the genus Molva, in the family Lotidae.

    Other deep creatures now being harvested or targeted as seafood include rattails, skates, squid, red crabs, orange roughy, black oreos, smooth oreos, hoki, blue ling, southern blue whiting, sablefish, black scabbard fish and spiny dogfish.

  2. 2

    Any of various codlike saltwater fish often used as food by humans, those of the genus Molva, in the family Lotidae. A common ling (Molva molva).

Etymology

From Middle English lenge, of Germanic origin. Cognate with Old Norse langa. Probably related to long.

noun

  1. 1

    Any of various varieties of heather or broom.

  2. 2

    Any of various varieties of heather or broom. Common heather (Calluna vulgaris)

    I was sitting by a path on a tussock between some bushes, whence I could overlook the path and a little valley to which it led down, and where nothing but ling and heather grew.

    Partridges, enjoying their last weeks of security, rose whirring and clattering from among the ling.

Etymology

From Middle English ling, linge, from Old Norse lyng.

noun

  1. 1

    Variant of linguisticsinformalClipping of linguistics.

Forms

plural
lings
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).