Meaning
A person who keeps dropping things or fails to catch what is thrown or hit to them, as if their fingers were smeared with butter. Used as a good-humoured label or taunt, especially at ball games ('Now then, butterfingers!'). Informal and teasing rather than seriously insulting; the form is plural but denotes one person and takes a singular verb. Informal and teasing; affectionate among teammates, mildly insulting when aimed at a stranger. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The adjective came first: in The English Huswife (1615) Gervase Markham wrote that a good housewife 'must not be butter fingered', the image being that things slip from greasy fingers. The noun is a product of the 1830s. Its earliest known citation, documented by Word Histories, is Theodore Edward Hook's serial novel Gilbert Gurney in the New Monthly Magazine of June 1835, where a crowd shouts 'butter fingers' at an executioner who drops a head. Charles Dickens then used 'Now, butter-fingers' as a cricket taunt in The Pickwick Papers (serialized 1836-37); he is often credited with coining the word and plainly popularized it, but Hook's use is two years earlier, and Etymonline's 1837 dating of the noun reflects the Dickens-era flurry rather than a first use. Claims that the word originated in Bentley's Miscellany are not supported by the standard references. The taunt then settled into cricket vocabulary and crossed into American baseball by the late 19th century.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a pair of butterfingers
- butterfingered
- you butterfingers
Usage Examples
- Butterfingers! That is the third glass you have dropped this week.
- She was branded the team's butterfingers after fumbling two catches in the final over.
- Do not hand the rings to Marcus - he turns into a complete butterfingers under pressure.