December 11, 1997

thumbnail

My dictionary decribes the word "thumbnail"--not "thumb-nail"--as an adjective, meaning "concise, brief," dating back to 1852. It is also used in the computer industry to describe a small version of a graphic. Would you elaborate on the etymology of the word?

The earliest sense of the word thumbnail--which has been written over the years as thumb nail, thumb-nail, and thumbnail--is, as you might expect, 'the nail of the thumb'. This sense is first found in the early seventeenth century, though one would imagine that it has actually been around a good deal longer than that.

Thumbnail was often used in allusive phrases referring to small things. For instance, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay, "The whole code...may be written on the thumbnail."

By the middle of the nineteenth century, thumbnail developed the sense 'a drawing the size of the thumbnail', which was often found as an attributive (as in "a thumbnail sketch"). The 1852 date in your dictionary represents the earliest known example of this construction. The word was then used figuratively, as both a noun and an adjective, to refer to anything small or concise, such as a biographical essay.

The verb thumbnail 'to describe briefly or concisely' is first found in the 1930s.

The computer use, 'a small graphical representation, as of a larger graphic, a page layout, etc.' is a specific application of the general sense. It is first found in the 1980s.