Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. a beggar, a tramp, a worthless person.

1885		Eng. Illus. Mag. Apr. 509: No rowdy ding, but a few quiet and well-known bookies, who were ready enough to lay the odds to a modest fiver [F&H].
1929		E. Booth Stealing Through Life 66: He’s an awful harmless ding [...] He can’t steal because he ain’t got the guts, and he just gets by with that car and his bum broad.
1933		Ersine Und. and Prison Sl. 32: ding, n. An able bodied-beggar [...] dinger. n. [...] 3. A ding.
1949		Monteleone Criminal Sl. (rev. edn).
1968		in J.P. Spradley You Owe Yourself a Drunk (1988) 35: A well-dressed gent, New Year’s day, hands bums/dings a buck.
1981		A. Dangor ‘Shadow of Paradise’ in Waiting for Leila (2001) 130: Visit a whorehouse every day! That old ding? His back won’t take the strain.
1991		(con. 1920s) O.D. Brooks Legs 120: He’s not going to risk forty years on the line for a couple of ding hiesers like us.

2. (Aus.) a derog. term for foreigners, esp. Italians and Greeks; also attrib.

1932		New Call (Perth) 14 Jan. 21/2: Short, broad, typically Italian in feature and pose, a seventeen year old youth, stood before Mr. Horgan in the Children's Court [...] From his head flared an outcrop of fiery red hair. ‘Strewth,’ ejaculated a constable sitting in court, ‘a red-headed Ding!’.
1934		West Australian (Perth) 24 Mar. 7/1: Pereria [...] said that during the first day of the riots he was insulted by several young men as being a ‘ding,’ although he was an Australian-born. He had assisted a foreigner after the riots, and. had been commended by the Jugo-Slav consul for it.
1941		Baker Popular Dict. Aus. Sl. 23: Ding, An Italian.
1950		(con. 1936–46) K.S. Prichard Winged Seeds (1984) 30: Some of the I-talians and Yugoslavs dug a trench [...] The mob rolled up to chase ’em out of the trench, yellin’ like mad: ‘Clean up the Dings! Clean up the Dings!’.
1955		N. Pulliam I Travelled a Lonely Land (1957) 233/1: eyeto (ding) an Italian.
1962		S. Gore Down the Golden Mile 30: He’s a Ding. [...] He was born in Italy, wasn’t he?
1963		R. McGregor-Hastie Compleat Migrant 16: You won’t get far with them dings!
1979		(con. 1934) G. Stewart Leveller 24: No matter what race, Slav, Greek, Italian, Maltese, they were all Dings.
1986		C. Bowles G’DAY 27: LES: Wossfer tea? I could eat an orse an chase the jockey. MAUREEN: Spag bog. LES: Jeez, not ding food again. Woss wrong with chook?
1999		G. Seal Lingo 26: ding — derogatory term for a southern European migrant, frequently Italian.
2013		D. Whish-Wilson Zero at the Bone [ebook] ‘The ding prick. The smart-arse little prick.’ ‘There were eyewitnesses, who saw Leo Marrone and his boys’.

3. (US, also dinglame) a fool, a mentally unstable person, thus Ding Tank/Ward/Wing, the psychiatric section of a prison.

1970		(con. 1910s) Gaddis & Long Panzram (2002) 60: A ‘ding’ (‘crazy,’ mental unstable convict).
1971–2		C. Shafer ‘Catheads [...] and Cho-Cho Sticks’ in Abernethy Bounty of Texas (1990) 202: ding, dinglame, n. – one of little mentality.
1986		J. Ellroy Suicide Hill 17‘: ‘What's a ding trusty do?’ [...] As [Officer] Gordon Meyers explained it, the job was simple. Sleep all day while the dings were dinged out on their ‘medication’[...] At night, [. . .] feed the dings their one meal per day.
2001		OnLine Dict. of Playground Sl. 🌐 ding n. a particularly stupid person.

4. attrib. use of sense 3.

1976		M. Braly False Starts 170: Rollie had been at Preston when I was there, in the Ding Company.
1981		J. Wambaugh Glitter Dome (1982) 86: A surefire scheme to get Woofer in the ding ward at the Veterans’ Hospital.
1986		J. Ellroy Suicide Hill 8: Module 2700 off the Los Angeles Main County Jail is known as the Ding Tank. [. . .] [I]t is the facility for nonviolent prisoners too mentally disturbed to exist in the general inmate population.
1999		E. Bunker Mr Blue 320: I hoped to be put in the ‘ding’ tank.

5. (US prison) an outsider.

1969

B. Jackson Thief’s Primer 56: ding: A manuscript by another thief described a ding as ‘anyone outside the group of good fellows who is too square or too stupid to be accepted. The good fellows haven’t any real reason for not liking him; he isn’t a fink or a punk. He’s just a ding.’.