What do you call your smallest finger?
I call it my little finger, but I hear more and more people in the UK calling it their pinkie / pinky, which I thought was exclusively used in North America. Is this name used in some dialects of English in the UK, or is this an example of American influence?
[Addendum] The word pinkie apparently comes from Dutch, via Scots. It was first recorded as meaning little finger in John Jamieson’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language in 1808. It comes from the Old Dutch phrase pinck ooghen (pink eye = half-shut or peering eye), which is the root of the modern Dutch verb pinkogen (to half close the eyes or squint). The modern Dutch word for little finger is pink, the diminutive of which is pinkje [source]. Other etymologies are available.
Anatomical names for the fingers are:
– 1st finger (thumb)
– 2st finger, digitus secundus or digitus II
– 3rd finger, digitus tertius, digitus III, digitus medius
– 4th finger, digitus quartus, digitus IV, digitus annularis, digitus medicinalis
– 5th finger, digitus quintus, digitus V
Others names for the fingers include:
– Thumb
– Index finger, pointer finger, forefinger, trigger finger
– Middle finger, bird finger, long finger
– Ring finger
– Little finger, baby finger, pinky
Source: http://www.yourdictionary.com/finger
Do you use other names for fingers?
The OED has pinkie marked as ‘orig. Sc.’
In Finnish they are
– peukalo (doesn’t really mean anything, but might come from a root meaning ‘edge’)
– etusormi ‘forefinger’
– keskisormi ‘middle finger’
– nimetön ‘nameless’ (because of old magical uses of the finger)
– pikkusormi ‘little finger’, or pikkurilli (again, rilli doesn’t have a meaning)
I asssociate pinkie with Ireland and Scotland, but I could be mistaken. I can think of two possible origins:
i. a word for ‘small’ – c.f. Italian piccolo, French petit, Shetland dialect peerie, Finnish pikku
ii. an I.E. root meaning ‘five’ – c.f. Lithuanian penki, Greek πέντε, Hindi panch
It could even be a conflation of the two.
The ring finger is called “nameless” in Russian, too. I had never heard about magical uses.