Finger

How to spell finger

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce finger

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does finger mean?

1. nounOne of the five jointed digits at the end of the hand, often excluding the thumb.
2. verbTo touch or handle something with the fingers.

Finger in a sentence

• noun

  She pointed with one finger at the figure on the spreadsheet.

• verb

  Customers tend to finger the fabric before deciding to buy it.

• noun

  He caught his finger in the car door and bruised the nail.

• verb

  She would absentmindedly finger the coins in her coat pocket.

Where does finger come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a thoroughly native English word, recorded in Old English as 'finger' with essentially the spelling we still use today. It traces back to the Proto-Germanic 'fingraz', the shared ancestor of German 'Finger', Dutch 'vinger', and Old Norse 'fingr', so it has been stable across the whole Germanic family for well over a thousand years. Scholars often link 'fingraz' to the Proto-Indo-European root 'penkwe', meaning 'five', which would make a finger literally 'one of the five', a neat tie to the five digits of the hand. The verb sense, meaning to touch or handle something with the fingers, developed naturally in Middle English. Because the word is short and phonetic, the only thing worth noticing for spelling is that the hard 'g' sound is written with a plain 'g', not a 'gg' or 'gu', so it is one of the few words in this set that almost never trips an adult up.

How the word is built

• finger (Old English finger: a digit of the hand); a single unsplit native root, not a prefix-suffix compound