butterfingers
Americannoun
plural
butterfingersnoun
Other Word Forms
Etymology
Origin of butterfingers
Explanation
A butterfingers is someone with a clumsy tendency to drop things they're holding. Being a butterfingers is considered a particularly bad trait in baseball, for obvious reasons. The common use of this term by sportscasters in the 1920s inspired the name for the newly-invented candy known as Butterfinger. Before that, many people credited Charles Dickens with coining the word in The Pickwick Papers, in the mouth of a character watching an athlete drop a ball. However, word sleuths have traced butterfingers back at least as far as a 1615 book that described a "good housewife" this way: "she must not be butter-fingered."
Vocabulary lists containing butterfingers
Sideways Stories from Wayside School
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Vocabulary from Readings 2, Unit 2
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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.
The Rams would probably love to trade Akers and maybe Williams overall performance in this game — minus the butterfingers — showed them they can.
From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 17, 2023
Should England lose out, they will have questions to answer over their cavalier first-innings declaration, the fitness of Moeen Ali's finger and Bairstow's butterfingers.
From BBC • Jun. 19, 2023
Jeudy may be a great route runner that consistently gets open, but those butterfingers are betraying those fantastic feet.
From Seattle Times • Dec. 28, 2020
Speaking as a chronic butterfingers myself: I really don’t think your wife is going to hurt your baby.
From Slate • Nov. 10, 2020
I must have looked confused because he told me, “That’s my horn, my ax, my saxophone, the thing I make all my money with, so don’t get butterfingers and drop it.”
From "Bud, Not Buddy" by Christopher Paul Curtis
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.
