Eng

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A letter, written as ŋ, that stands for the nasal sound heard at the end of words like sing ; a short form used for a language name or a technical discipline
2. The phonetic symbol ŋ denoting the velar nasal consonant ; a shortened label standing for a national language or an applied science
3. A symbol representing the 'ng' sound in phonetic transcription ; an abbreviation used in writing for a language or for a branch of applied science

Etymology: The letter-name "eng" is one of the odder entries in the alphabet of phonetics: it names the sound at the end of "sing," the velar nasal written in the International Phonetic Alphabet as a letter with a tail. Its name seems to have been formed on analogy with the names of the other nasal consonants, "em" for m and "en" for n, so the sound was given a parallel label rather than an inherited one. The word appears in English only sparingly. Apart from the Middle English compound "ang-nail," which is a different word that happens to share the root sense of "narrow" or "tight," no surviving medieval text uses it. The likeliest ancestry runs through the Germanic family of "narrow": Dutch "eng," German "eng," and Low German "enj" all mean "narrow" or "confined," and the phonetic name may have been drawn from that root.