Other forms: fingers, fingering, fingered
A finger is one of the five long parts of your hand. Point a finger, count on your fingers, finger food.
The thumb is a finger by some counts and not by others, which is why the hand is sometimes described as four fingers and a thumb. Fingers have no muscles of their own — the muscles that move them are in the forearm, pulling on tendons. Note keep your fingers crossed; point the finger; and green fingers, which is British for a gift with plants.
1nounfingerOne of the long parts of your hand.
“She wore a thin gold ring on her little finger.”
2verbtouchTo touch or handle with the fingers.
“She nervously fingered the necklace around her neck.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
finger is a body part.
Old English finger goes back to a root related to the word for five. A finger is, at some distance, one of the five.
Proto-Indo-European
*pénkʷe
Proto-Indo-European
*penkʷrós
Proto-Germanic
*fingraz — finger
Proto-West Germanic
*fingr
Old English
finger — finger
Middle English
fynger
English, today
finger
Built from
From Middle English fynger, finger, from Old English finger (“finger”), from Proto-West Germanic fingr, from Proto-Germanic fingraz (“finger”), from Proto-Indo-European penkʷrós, from pénkʷe (“five”). Cognate with West Frisian finger, German and Low German Finger, Dutch vinger, Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish finger, Faroese and Icelandic fingur; see also xcl հինգերորդ (“fifth”). More at five.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA