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thumbnail

thumbnail

18 3.4
A small picture that shows a larger photo or video
  • noun
  • /ˈθʌmˌneɪl/
  • Texting
translation icon : miniatura
  • When browsing the gallery, I clicked on the thumbnail to see the full-size image.
  • thumbnail image
  • thumbnail sketch
  • thumbnail page

There's words on the thumbnail itself, like big bold words.

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Examples

  • In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., a search engine displayed thumbnail images of an artist's photographs on its website.

    Academic text (2016)
  • In iBooks and the iPad Kindle app, covers are reduced to thumbnails barely 200 pixels high.

    Blog text (13)
  • So right now we are actually trying to get the thumbnail for this video.

  • And we have a thumbnail and title for the video.

  • Video editor could also be doing thumbnail designs for your videos.

  • Pages presents a thumbnail view of all pages in the open issue.

    Academic text (2011)
  • If they never click the thumbnail, they'll never know how good the content was.

  • Here, clicking on a thumbnail causes a smaller window to appear with the full-size image.

    Academic text (2001)
  • Clicking on a given thumbnail will then cause that image to appear full-sized in the main "picture" frame.

    Academic text (2001)
  • I'm currently multitasking and making a thumbnail for the blog you guys just saw.

Synonyms

picture
vsthumbnail
1.0

An image like a drawing or photograph that shows something

is a much smaller preview meant for navigation rather than full viewing
image
vsthumbnail
1.0

A picture showing a person or thing

is a small reduced preview used online to represent larger files
miniature
vsthumbnail
1 5.5

A small detailed painting often found in old books

is a digital reduced preview used mainly for file navigation and online galleries

How Informative

chart
420 1.3
diagram
88 2.8
visual
76 3.5
picture
1.0
thumbnail
  • Texting
18 3.4
icon
117 3.9

Surface Forms

thumbnail singular
thumbnails plural

Morphology

thumbnail = thumb + nail (semi-transparent) = thumb + nail

Metaphorical extension from the literal small size of a thumbnail to denote a reduced-size image; relation to components is indirect.

Etymology

The word thumbnail is also used for a very small picture because people compared tiny images to the size of a thumbnail, so a thumbnail image is a tiny preview of a larger photo or video.