1 the short thick finger at the side of the hand, slightly apart from the other four:
She still sucks her thumb when she's worried.
seealsoGREENTHUMB
2 the part of a glove that covers the thumb:
There's a hole in the thumb.
IDIOMS
be all (fingers and) thumbs to be awkward with your hands so that you drop things or are unable to do sth
thumbs up / down used to show that sth has been accepted/rejected or that it is/is not a success:
Their proposals were given the thumbs down. * It looks like it's thumbs up for their latest album.
under sb's thumb (of a person) completely controlled by sb:
She's got him under her thumb.
moreatRULEn., SOREadj., TWIDDLEv.
Part of speech: verb
1 to make a signal with your thumb to passing drivers to ask them to stop and take you somewhere: [V, +adv./prep.] He had thumbed all across Europe. * [VN] We managed to thumb a lift / ride with a truck driver.
2 [VN] [often +adv./prep.] to touch or move sth with your thumb:
She thumbed off the safety catch of her pistol.
seealsoWELLTHUMBED
IDIOMS
thumb your nose at sb/sth to make a rude sign with your thumb on your nose; to show that you have no respect for sb/sth:
The company just thumbs its nose at the legislation on pollution.
PHRASALVERBS
thumb through sth to turn the pages of a book quickly in order to get a general idea of what is in it:
I was thumbing through my address book to see who we could invite.
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for thumb is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is thumb a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, thumb is tagged as noun.
Does thumb appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — thumb appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
