A ping is a a pulse of sound in active sonar. In the Internet world, it is a networking utility and the echo request message in Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP).

To ping is to bounce off something with a sharp, high sound.

Like a sonar, on the Internet, a ping bounces back figuratively and, again like a sonar, the information sent and received is very limited/short/sharp.

Ping is a utility to determine whether a specific IP address is accessible. It works by sending a packet to the specified address and waiting for a reply. PING is used primarily to troubleshoot Internet connections. There are many freeware and sharewarePing utilities available for personal computers.

Precisely, ping is a computer network administration software utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network and to measure the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer.

Ping operates by sending Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request packets to the target host and waiting for an ICMP response. In the process it measures the time from transmission to reception (round-trip time)[1] and records any packet loss. The results of the test are printed in the form of a statistical summary of the response packets received, including the minimum, maximum, and the mean round-trip times, and sometimes the standard deviation of the mean.

The Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite. It is used by network devices, like routers, to send error messages indicating, for example, that a requested service is not available or that a host or router could not be reached. ICMP can also be used to relay query messages.

ICMP for Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is also known as ICMPv4. IPv6 has a similar protocol, ICMPv6.