finger's breadth
- noun
- Archaic
:
ancho de un dedo
- Lower by only a couple of fingers' breadth, and his precious arm would have ended on the slaughterhouse pile outside a surgeon's tent... if he'd managed to make it back to a surgeon's tent at all.
Examples
-
The ancient map indicated that the valley was only a few finger's breadth wide.
-
He measured the gap between the two rocks at a mere finger's breadth.
-
The small difference in height between the two shelves was just a finger's breadth.
Synonyms
63
9.8
A small measure about the width of a finger
3
9.9
An old small measure of length about three quarters of an inch
1
9.9
The width of a finger used as a quick measure
An ancient Greek measure of length about the width of a finger
How Wide
- Archaic
5
9.9
1
5.0
- Archaic
12
9.7
∞
1.0
- Archaic
- Informal
3
5.6
Surface Forms
Morphology
finger's + breadth
The meaning is directly compositional: 'finger's' indicates possession (of a finger) and 'breadth' means width, so the phrase denotes the width of a finger as a unit of measure. This body-part-based measurement is common cross-linguistically and follows ordinary English possessive + noun composition, so a B1 learner who knows the constituents will readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
Finger's breadth comes from using the width of a finger, the breadth, as a quick way to show a very small space between two things. So it means 'a very small distance' or 'a tiny amount'.