SO WHAT DOES THE DICTIONARY SAY?

shin·gle

¹    [shing-guhl]  Show IPA noun, verb, -gled, -gling.

noun

1.

a thin piece of wood, slate, metal, asbestos, or the like,usually oblong, laid in overlapping rows to cover the roofs and walls of buildings.

Now in New Zealand we would call these shingles, tiles and mostly they would be made of terra cotta.  Although our older Victorian buildings have slate roofs. Our little church, which is well over 100 years old, has a slate roof; several tiles fell off with the Christchurch earthquake.

My favourite type of roof is tin. Good old corrugated iron. I love the sound of rain as it plunks down on it, or the scuttling of a possum as it races across. Almost every house I've ever lived in has had a tin roof. So when I write, my characters invariably live under one. Which works for 19th century New Zealand and the American West. In England there might be a thatched roof, or in Scandinavia a turf roof with a full 'head' of grass. I wonder what it would be like to live under one of those?

However, today is not about the roofing definition of shingles. It's about the following:

shin·gles

   [shing-guhlz]  Show IPA

noun ( used with a singular or plural verb ) Pathology .

a disease caused by the varicella-zoster virus, especially by reactivated virus in an older person, characterized by skin eruptions and pain along the course of involved sensory nerves.

As I write this, I am sitting up in bed, feeling sore and miserable.  I want to work on my short story, the next chapter of my novel, or critique a chapter for a friend. Instead, I think I will read, play some silly Face Book games and snooze a little too.

Oh, and thanks to Dictionary.com for the definitions.