How to Use finger in a Sentence

finger

1 of 2 noun
  • She was so mad, she gave him the finger.
  • He slipped the ring onto her finger.
  • She ran her fingers through his hair.
  • Don't stick your fingers in the cookie batter!
  • The baby held onto my thumb with her tiny fingers.
  • Some angry driver flipped me the finger on the highway this morning.
  • He drummed his fingers on the table impatiently.
  • This song fits like a ring on my finger.
    — Andrea Flores, Los Angeles Times, 4 May 2026
  • Duane couldn’t put his finger on it.
    — Marguerite Reiss, Outdoor Life, 9 Oct. 2025
  • With the swipe of a finger, a video plays.
    — Kamal Ahmed, Fortune, 3 Mar. 2026
  • While the crowd looks through their fingers.
    — Jack Pitt-Brooke, New York Times, 25 May 2026
  • Loosen the plant’s roots with your fingers.
    — Karen Brewer Grossman, Southern Living, 12 Sep. 2025
  • One minute, his fingers danced on his smart phone.
    — Sean Keeler, Denver Post, 2 Mar. 2026
  • One of their own had slipped through their fingers.
    — Sebastian Stafford-Bloor, New York Times, 3 Feb. 2026
  • He's since been taught that's the naughty finger.
    — Daniella Gray, MSNBC Newsweek, 20 Sep. 2025
  • Note that there are no loops to put your fingers through.
    — Kiana Murden, Vogue, 18 Oct. 2025
  • Why is your face still blue, your fingers still pruney?
    — Jasmin 'iolani Hakes, Literary Hub, 5 Feb. 2026
  • Your dad points his finger at his own head and spins it.
    — Matthew Shen Goodman, Harpers Magazine, 19 Sep. 2025
  • The cold made my fingers and toes ache, and my lungs burn.
    — Elizabeth Kelsey, Time, 26 Jan. 2026
  • Use your finger to draw a line across the back of your spoon.
    — Martha Stewart, 3 July 2026
  • That's the width of three fingers held at arm’s length.
    — Jamie Carter, Forbes.com, 14 Sep. 2025
  • Keep adult and child fingers clear of the footrest lever or chair base.
    — Casey Seiden, Parents, 11 July 2023
  • If soil sticks to your finger, wait a few more days and test again.
    — Arricca Elin Sansone, Country Living, 11 Aug. 2023
  • That’s less than the width of two of your fingers held at arm’s length!
    — Mike Lynch, Twin Cities, 31 May 2026
  • Soon, my legs would start to shake and my fingers would start to slip.
    — Emily Meg Weinstein september 5, Literary Hub, 5 Sep. 2025
  • If in doubt, go try it in the store to see what your fingers think.
    — Brian Westover, PC Magazine, 9 Mar. 2026
  • Press down with your back finger to shoot the front of the board in the air.
    — Bestreviews, Mercury News, 18 Mar. 2026
  • Check the soil with your finger first to make sure the top inch or two is dry.
    — Brandee Gruener, Southern Living, 7 June 2026
  • Even if there are finger prints on the windows.
    — Patricia Shannon, Southern Living, 2 Nov. 2025
  • Rub stains with a finger or scrub with an old toothbrush.
    — Sheila Kim, The Spruce, 31 May 2026

finger

2 of 2 verb
  • He was fingered as a suspect.
  • The fence wriggled around it, fingering the hole like a wound.
    — Andrew Liptak, The Verge, 8 July 2018
  • Our connection was a bit like that [snaps fingers].
    — Derek Lawrence, HollywoodReporter, 2 Jan. 2026
  • One man walked up and down the sidewalk, fingering the small wooden beads of a rosary.
    — Angie Leventis Lourgos, chicagotribune.com, 10 June 2019
  • To finger them as the cause of inflation is like blaming wet sidewalks for rain.
    — John Tamny, Forbes, 22 Jan. 2023
  • This pouch is made of fingering-weight yarn and is tiny enough to be worn as a necklace, the designer says.
    — Mary Mooney, OregonLive.com, 20 Oct. 2017
  • The big spoon can kiss their neck, play with their nipples, and rub their clit (or finger them, or give them a hand job) from behind.
    — Erika W. Smith, refinery29.com, 25 May 2022
  • Slick black ropes of water fingered the college foundations.
    — Literary Hub, 26 Feb. 2026
  • Last week, the club filed its counterclaim, fingering its worker as the culprit.
    — Kate Gibson, CBS News, 12 Nov. 2019
  • Icy fingers up and down your spine suggest a magic number in the romance department.
    — Minerva, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 Oct. 2017
  • So plausible, in fact, that many pundits fingered each for the win at the beginning of the season.
    — Nate Jones, Vulture, 12 Jan. 2026
  • The little boy, with a badly bruised face and a jagged slash running across his forehead, fingered a toy car with his bandaged hand.
    — Clare Malone, The New Yorker, 13 Jan. 2024
  • Its rules place the onus upon anyone fingered as a possible alien to prove otherwise.
    — The Economist, 5 July 2018
  • Van der Ham put two and two together and fingered the passenger as the culprit.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 2 Nov. 2023
  • Kuma fingered a loose, perforated canopy strung up by one of his students and discussed it briefly with him.
    — Nikil Saval, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2018
  • Bites range from charcuterie to finger sandwiches to ice cream sundaes.
    — Tiney Ricciardi, Denver Post, 25 Sep. 2025
  • James, back on the field for a theoretical extra point, fingers the top of his facemask.
    — Conor Orr, SI.com, 17 Dec. 2017
  • Epley fingered a joystick controller to tilt the chair back until Delahunt was face up.
    — oregonlive, 15 Oct. 2019
  • Three other teens in the car from which the fatal gunshots were fired have fingered Russaw as the shooter.
    — David Owens, courant.com, 24 Apr. 2018
  • Some tropical species, like paddle grass, have long, threadlike stigmas that finger the water for pollen.
    — David George Haskell, Big Think, 27 Mar. 2026
  • The way the chords are placed on the keys (flat-fingered on the black notes) is not so much a vision of reflections, whether trees, clouds or water lilies.
    — Stephen Hough, New York Times, 2 Mar. 2018
  • Often rumored as the victim of an inter-gang dispute, some have even fingered hip hop mega moguls of ordering the deed.
    — Alex Heigl, PEOPLE.com, 11 Dec. 2019
  • Slowly Altieri’s gun came down, turned toward the sidewalk, finger off the trigger.
    — Lizz Schumer, PEOPLE, 10 Oct. 2025
  • Combs had falsely fingered Garcia to Williams as someone who had taken his money in a drug deal gone bad.
    — Susan Young, PEOPLE, 14 Jan. 2026
  • True Detective seemed to be fingering one of its leading men, only to render those clues red herrings.
    — Willa Paskin, Slate Magazine, 3 May 2017
  • Bare branches finger and rearrange the sky, and sometimes stars drill into it and mountains sharpen themselves against it.
    — Murr Brewster, Christian Science Monitor, 19 Feb. 2025
  • This moment, this sudden encounter with nothingness, is as close as a dying memoirist can come to fingering the edge of the knife about to cut her throat.
    — Laura Miller, Slate Magazine, 5 July 2017
  • His method quickly finds its way into the courts, where it is used to exonerate people wrongly accused of crimes and to finger the true culprits.
    — Popular Mechanics Editors, Popular Mechanics, 20 Oct. 2022
  • Bennett compared the prints to finger flutings — a kind of prehistoric art made by people running their fingers over soft surfaces on cave walls.
    — Nicoletta Lanese, Scientific American, 21 Sep. 2021
  • Using a fingering yarn when a knitting pattern specifies DK means your garment will end up much too small.
    — Bestreviews, Mercury News, 23 Sep. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'finger.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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