Other forms: fingerprints, fingerprinting, fingerprinted
A fingerprint is the pattern of tiny ridges on the tip of your finger, and the mark that pattern leaves behind. The greasy smudges on a glass, on a phone screen, on a light switch by the door.
No two people share a full set, and the pattern stays the same from birth to old age, which is why police lift fingerprints from a crime scene and why a phone unlocks to one thumb and not another. As a verb, to fingerprint someone is to take their prints — at a police station, at a border. The word also means any unmistakable trace of who did something: the raid had his fingerprints all over it, or a genetic fingerprint that names a person from a single hair. A mark left by the whole hand is a handprint; a fingerprint is the fingertip alone.
1nounfingerprintThe pattern of ridges on a fingertip, or the mark it leaves on a surface.
“They found a clear fingerprint on the inside of the window.”
2noununmistakableAn unmistakable sign of who or what was responsible.
“The design carries the architect's fingerprint on every floor.”
3verbtakeTo take someone's fingerprints.
“Everyone entering the country that year was fingerprinted.”
fingerprint is a mark.
Fingerprint hides nothing at all: it is finger and print, joined together. The word says exactly what the thing is, which is rare enough in English to be worth noticing.
From finger + print.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Crime & Law, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 35 of A Man Called Ove.
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