What does the German name Lingerman mean?

Factual Questions
1

My genealogy includes a line with the name Lingerman that migrated from SE Pennsylvania to New Jersey in the late 1800’s-ish. This name appears to be German and my mother told me that this family line was German. When I was a teen, I found a German language book in the crawl space of my parents’ home with a girl’s name on it with the last name of Lingerman. I don’t have all the details in front of me but given other details in the family it looks like the Lingermans may have been Pennsylvania Dutch Lutherans.

One thing I haven’t been able to find out is what the name “Lingerman” means. I have asked several German speakers and none of them can give me an answer other than to tell me that they don’t know and warn me that not all German names necessarily mean anything.

Does this name have a meaning? I know that “man” or “mann” is a cognate of English’s “man” and may indicate that the name means a person of “Linger”, whatever Linger or a linger is. Is it a place name? Could it be a hybrid name made from a non-German (e.g. Slavic or Romance) root that was Germanized?

2

Linger doesn’t mean anything in German. There is a town named Linger in Luxembourg. The etymology of the root/affix “ling” and “linger” is complicated in the IE language group and could refer to a number of things, such as: name, language, something small, linen, something long, to live somewhere, and other stuff.

3

Names get complicated fast. My last name is Dillman, and it was Dillmann before coming to North America. There are a huge number of variants though, such as Dihlmann.

Just to totally botch the autonomy of my online existence, another surname in my family tree is Dechant. That can be French of German depending on how you pronounce it. And they lived right on the border. But either version could be a drifted version of DeSantis, and indeed, Spain used my ancestral homelands as a land route to their territory in the Netherlands.