Old English stingan "to prick with a small point" (of weapons, insects, plants, etc.), from Proto-Germanic *stenganan (cf. Old Norse stinga, Old High German stungen "to prick," Gothic us-stagg "to prick out," Old High German stanga, German stange "pole, perch," German stengel "stalk, stem"), from PIE *stengh-, nasalized form of root *stegh- "to prick, sting" (cf. Old English stagga "stag," Greek stokhos "pointed stake"). Specialized to insects late 15c. Slang meaning "to cheat, swindle" is from 1812.
Old English stincg, steng "act of stinging, stinging pain," from the root of sting (v.). Meaning "carefully planned theft or robbery" is attested from 1930; sense of "police undercover entrapment" first attested 1975.
sting (stĭng)
v. stung (stŭng), sting·ing, stings
To pierce or wound painfully with or as if with a sharp-pointed structure or organ, as that of certain insects.
To introduce venom by stinging.
To cause to feel a sharp smarting pain by or as if by pricking with a sharp point.
The act of stinging.
The wound or pain caused by or as if by stinging.
The venom apparatus of a stinging organism.
A tricking or entrapment, either in a confidence scheme or as part of a law-enforcement operation: have used sting to describe undercover operations that use a bogus business operation as a front/ Let's contrast Abscam with traditional law-enforcement stings (1975+)
verb
A parallel dialect of Scheme intended to serve as a high-level operating system for symbolic programming languages. First-class threads and processors and customisable scheduling policies.
E-mail:
["A Customizable Substrate for Concurrent Languages", S. Jagannathan et al, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 1992].
(1994-11-03)