The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Five Fingers

Human beings count in tens. We say twenty-one, two, three etc. until we get to twenty-nine, thirty. Then we start again with thirty-one, two, three, four until we get to another multiple of ten and the process repeats. The reason we do this is that we have five fingers on each hand, making ten in total. If the three-fingered sloth could count, he would probably do so in groups of six.

Counting on your fingers is such a natural thing to do that the word digit, which originally just meant finger, now means number as well. This also means that when information is stored in the form of numbers it becomes digital.

The Old English names for the fingers were much more fun than our own. The index finger was once the towcher, or toucher, because it was used for touching things. We call it the index finger, but not because we use it for running through the index of a book. Both indexes come from the Latin word indicare because an index, whether it’s in a book or on your hand, can indicate or point you in the right direction. It’s the pointing finger.

The boringly-named middle finger was once called the fool’s finger. The Romans called it digitus infamis (infamous), obscenus (obscene), and impudicus (rude). This is because they invented the habit of sticking the middle finger up at people they didn’t like. The Roman poet Martial once wrote an epigram that went:

Which translates extraordinarily loosely as:

The fourth finger has a strange anatomical property that gives it both its ancient and modern names: the leech finger and the ring finger.

There is a vein that runs directly from the fourth finger to the heart, or at least that’s what doctors used to believe. Nobody is quite sure why, as there isn’t actually any such thing. Yet it was this belief that made the fourth finger vital in medieval medicine. Doctors reasoned that if this finger connected directly to the heart, then it was probably possible to use it as a proxy. You could cure heart disease and treat heart attacks simply by doing things to the fourth finger of the patient’s hand. The medieval word for a doctor was a leech,[16] and so this digit used to be known as the leech finger.

Who would be so silly as to believe anything like that nowadays? Well, anybody who’s married. You see, we put the wedding ring on that finger precisely because of that non-existent vein. If the finger and the heart are that closely connected, then you can trap your lover’s heart simply by encircling the finger in a gold ring. Hence ring finger.

And the little finger? Well the Old English used to use that for scratching their ears, and so they called it the ear finger.