The word "ring" has a long and rich history of semantic variation, as evidenced in WordNet. Its usage has been relatively steady over the last 150 years (with a slight increase in the last few decades), both in noun and verb usage. By looking at its collocate nouns, it is clear that the most frequent use is for sounds (phone, doorbell, bell), but also seen are the rings worn on the finger (wedding, diamond, gold).

Below are the collocate nouns comparing the late 1800s to the late 1900s. We see a wide variety of meanings here in just the first ten results. For the late 1800s, we can infer meanings of sound (bell, peal), group (Tammany, whiskey), and place (centre); the late 1900s show sound (phone, buzzer), shape (onion), place (boxing), jewelry (championship, bowl), and group (spy):

The words most relevant to the verb forms of "ring" (i.e. found most frequently in association with the word) are almost exclusively with bells, once again showing the tight semantic link to sound. The verbs most relevant to the noun forms of "ring" are inconsistent in meaning, with many semantic gleanings: encircling (shape), glittered, wears, and sparkled (jewelry), and jumps, picks, and answers (to the sound of a phone). Among all words most relevant to the noun form of "ring" is found frequent reference to jewelry.

Specific adjectives and adverbs through the years appear to be relatively stable in usage. When comparing adverbs by relevance between the two periods, one sees a series of much more trait-descriptive terms in the former period, whereas the latter period shows a bland set of location-descriptive adverbs:

Looking at strings of words in COHA didn't give much data, but some of the word phrases we find that use ring include boxing, finger, and truth (words such as welkin (heaven), as seen before in a few lists, and truth give a semantic meaning of goodness and right). Were the meanings found in the corpus broken up into categories, they would read as follows: