Linguist and lexicographer Ben Zimmer analyzes the origins of words in the news. Read previous columns here.

As cases of Covid-19 surge again in Great Britain, the country’s National Health Service has tried to stem the tide with a phone app that asks people to self-isolate for 10 days if they come into contact with someone who has tested positive for coronavirus. Those who are advised to take precautionary measures receive a notification, or a “ping,” in everyday parlance.

Last month, as the NHS Test and Trace app began “pinging” hundreds of thousands of people’s devices with self-isolation alerts, British media outlets were quick to dub the flurry of activity a “pingdemic.” And there have been many more variations on the “ping” theme. A headline on the satirical site NewsBiscuit imagined a “pingageddon” in which “NHS Covid app forces entire UK population to self-isolate.” In a Reddit forum called British Problems, one user moaned, “I’m starting to loathe the word ‘ping,’” while another observed, “We now live in the United Pingdom.”

While the “pingdemic” may be a novel phenomenon for the pandemic era, the word “ping” goes back nearly two centuries, first emerging as onomatopoeia for a short, high-pitched metallic sound, like bullets ricocheting. The Oxford English Dictionary notes an 1833 example from Michael Scott’s serialized novel “Tom Cringle’s Log,” describing a nautical battle: “We all pricked up our ears, and strained our eyes, while a bright, spitting sparkling fire of musketry opened at the gap, but there was no ping pinging of the shot overhead.” Two years later, another Scottish writer, James Edward Alexander, wrote in a travelogue about the civil war in Portugal, “If a button was shown, ‘ping’ went a bullet at it immediately.”

“ The age of computing took the sonar meaning of ‘ping’ and transferred it to network connections. ”

The 20th century brought new uses of “ping” as an interjection, noun and verb. With the advent of the internal combustion engine, new terms were devised to describe the metallic rattling noise created by faulty combustion: In the United Kingdom, the sound was called “pinking,” while in the United States and Australia, “pinging” was preferred. A 1923 advertisement for motor oil in the Detroit Free Press, for instance, referred to “the knocking or ‘pinging’ often experienced with an overheated or badly carbonized engine.”

During World War II, “ping” found a new use for the audible signal made by sonar equipment, as when a submarine detects another vessel in its midst. As one wartime writer put it in 1943, “a ‘ping’ is the slang term for an echo” in an anti-submarine sweep.

The age of computing took the sonar meaning of “ping” and transferred it to network connections. To test the reachability of another computer on a network, a tool was created in the early 1980s where an “echo request” could be sent out, much as sonar relies on measuring underwater echoes. The innovation is credited to Mike Muuss, who devised the original software program in December 1983 while working at the Ballistic Research Laboratory, an Army research facility in Maryland. As Muuss (who died in 2000) explained, “I named it after the sound that a sonar makes, inspired by the whole principle of echo-location.” A colleague, David Mills, soon came up with an acronymic expansion of the term, making “ping” stand for “Packet InterNet Groper.”

While the “ping” utility was intended for troubleshooting network issues, the word soon spread into broader use for sending an electronic message of any sort, like a text or email, or just getting in touch with someone in general. In a 2015 piece for Slate, Katy Waldman observed that “‘ping me’ or ‘I’ll ping him’ has dethroned ‘contact me’ or ‘I’ll reach out to him’ as trendy workplace signifiers.”

The “pinging” of contact-tracing apps has opened a new chapter in the word’s history. Combining “ping” with “pandemic” (along the lines of previous blends like “infodemic”) yields “pingdemic,” first popularized on Twitter by BBC political correspondent Chris Mason, who used it in a July 9 tweet. Will the British usage come to American shores, as “jab” did for a Covid shot? It might require the U.S. to start enforcing contact tracing more intensively for the word to ping its way across the Atlantic.