Meaning
To fail to catch, keep, or make use of someone or something, usually through inaction, hesitation, or inattention rather than deliberate choice. It is typically said of chances, money, time, offers, or people who drift away, and it carries a note of regret at a loss that was just barely avoidable. Neutral, mildly regretful register, equally at home in speech and writing. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The image is the literal one of an object escaping a closed hand - sand, water, or a fish squeezing free - and needs no derivation beyond itself. The collocation is genuinely old: the Oxford English Dictionary entry for finger, reproduced on Wiktionary, documents things slipping through the fingers in a Middle English citation dated to about 1412, from a text possibly composed before 1325, in that literal escaping sense. No major reference work records a discrete point at which the figurative sense (losing an opportunity or a person) was coined; the standard references treat it as a transparent metaphor that developed from the literal picture, so any claim of a specific first figurative attestation would go beyond the documented record.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- let something slip through your fingers
- slip through somebody's fingers
- slip through your grasp
- watch something slip through your fingers
Usage Examples
- If we keep haggling over the price, the buyer will slip through our fingers and the house will sit unsold for another year.
- She watched her last chance to study abroad slip through her fingers while she waited for a better offer that never came.
- Between inflation and impulse purchases, his salary seems to slip through his fingers before the month is out.