- present participle of finger.
noun
-
the technique or art of using one's fingers in playing a musical instrument, esp the piano
-
the numerals in a musical part indicating this
noun
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of fingering
Middle English word dating back to 1350–1400; see origin at finger, -ing 1
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Other remaining brand-name correspondents, including the ageless Lesley Stahl, for a while were feared to be fingering their rip cords too.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026
"I tend now to play parts of chords, rather than fingering the whole damn thing. I use these shortcuts that would be a nightmare for a guitar teacher."
From BBC ● Nov. 21, 2023
She had a leopard scarf elegantly wrapped around her head and was fingering a glittering ring and staring blankly into the distance.
From Reuters ● Feb. 7, 2023
He looked away, fingering a frayed edge of the carpet.
From Salon ● Dec. 15, 2022
“I’ll bet he learned each chord, each fingering after being shown just once, no stumbling, no complaining. And when he did make a mistake it was never more than once, right?”
From "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss
In junior high, he was given a battered cornet to play and, overnight, learned the fingerings of the instrument and the next day played “Pomp and Circumstance” for the band teacher.
From Washington Post ● Oct. 1, 2021
“My scores of Schumann, Chopin, Ravel, and Messiaen are still covered in the meticulous fingerings and often pointed criticisms that she would notate, bar after bar,” he wrote shortly after Loriod’s death, in 2010.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 10, 2018
Students learn and practice on a chanter, an oboe-like instrument with the same fingerings as the bagpipe’s melody pipe.
From Washington Times ● Jan. 31, 2017
His strings also had a curious habit of snapping in the middle of a performance, forcing Paganini to continue playing on ever fewer strings, with ever more virtuosic fingerings.
From New York Times ● Jun. 19, 2013
Young instrumentalists are encouraged to practice playing the chromatic scale in order to ensure that they know the fingerings for all the notes.
From "Understanding Basic Music Theory" by Catherine Schmidt-Jones and Russel Jones
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
