Thumbnail

How to spell thumbnail

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce thumbnail

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thumbnail mean?

1. nounA small version of a picture used as a preview that links to the larger image or file.
2. nounThe nail on the thumb.
3. adjectiveBrief and concise, giving only the essential outline.

Thumbnail in a sentence

• noun

  Click the thumbnail to open the full-size photo.

• noun

  He caught his thumbnail in the drawer and bruised it badly.

• adjective

  He gave a thumbnail summary of the report before the meeting started.

• noun

  The gallery shows each video as a tiny thumbnail along the bottom.

• noun

  She peeled the orange using just her thumbnail.

• adjective

  The manager asked for a thumbnail sketch of the new plan.

Where does thumbnail come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent native English compound, joining two very old Germanic words. The first half, thumb, descends from Old English thuma, meaning the short thick finger; that silent letter b was never pronounced and was added later by scribes who were copying the spelling pattern of words like 'dumb' and 'limb', which is exactly the trap that catches writers today. The second half, nail, comes from Old English nægel, which doubled up to mean both the horny plate on a finger and a metal fastening spike, since the two looked alike to early speakers. Put together, thumbnail literally named the nail on the thumb, and by the nineteenth century it had stretched to mean anything roughly the size of that nail, hence a 'thumbnail sketch'. In the computer age the same image gave us the small preview picture we now call a thumbnail. The whole spelling difficulty really lives in that hidden b inherited from thumb.

How the word is built

• thumb (Old English thuma: the thick finger)
• nail (Old English nægel: a horny plate or metal spike)