2805: Pink and Pinkie Aug 25, 2024

Out of the names for the five fingers, the fact that two of them have multiple names is quite notable, and historically, there were probably even more variations. For instance, the now-ubiquitous middle finger was once called the long finger. The index finger is still regularly referred to as the pointer finger, forefinger, or occasionally, the first finger. While there are fewer alternatives overall, the little finger is also interchangeably known as the ‘pinkie’ (sometimes spelt ‘pinky’). In truth, these differences aren't so significant. ‘Pinkie’ comes from the Dutch word pinkje/pinkie, which hyper-literally means “little little-finger,” as it includes the diminutive suffix ‘-je’ attached to ‘pink,’ meaning ‘little finger.’

You might think that this Dutch ‘pink’ and ‘finger’ are related; after all, when comparing Romance languages to Germanic languages, [p] often becomes [f] (e.g., English ‘feather’ and Greek φτερόν (pteron)), and [k] is simply the unvoiced version of [g]. However, Dutch isn't a Romance language, and these words aren't related.

What is likely related, somewhat surprisingly based on phonetics despite their lack of semantic similarity, is the word ‘pink.’ It’s possible that the word, which is the name of a type of flower (which is pink in color), is also related to ‘pink’ as a term for a calf or a type of small sailboat. It may likewise be related to the words ‘wink’ and ‘blink.’ Exactly how these connections developed is somewhat unclear, but they probably originated from a broader sense of something small jutting out.