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fingerprint

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈfɪŋɡɚˌpɹɪnt//

The natural pattern of ridges on the tips of human fingers, unique to each individual.

noun

  1. 1

    The natural pattern of ridges on the tips of human fingers, unique to each individual.

  2. 2

    The pattern left on a surface where an uncovered fingertip has touched, especially as used to identify the person who touched the surface.

    Nervously, he wiped the gun of fingerprints real and imaginary with the stocking-covered fingers.

    The crime scene investigator has the responsibility of collecting latent fingerprints.

  3. 3

    A unique combination of features that serves as an identification of something.

    acoustic fingerprint

    Most pharmacopoeial monographs of medicinal plants include TLC as method for identification based on a chromatographic fingerprint, which consists of a sequence of characteristic substance zones.

    The set of all location fingerprints and coordinates constitutes the location fingerprint database.

  4. 4

    A unique identification for a public key in asymmetric cryptography.

  5. 5

    figurativeA trace that gives evidence of someone's involvement.

    And continue to ask yourself the question, could the incredible complexity of the human body with its multitudinous specialized functions have come into being completely by chance or is it another fingerprint of God?

Etymology

From finger + print.

verb

  1. 1

    To take somebody's fingerprints.

    The jail staff fingerprints its inmates routinely

    Too often, the union says, farmers feel the police response is inadequate and the sentencing too lenient. It’s a view seemingly shared by one of the latest victims of bee rustling, Norfolk bee keeper Simon Greenwood, who told the Observer that police had taken some photos of the scene, fingerprinted a can and then sent him a letter to say no further action was being taken.

  2. 2

    To identify something uniquely by a combination of measurements.

    Analytical results from this combination of leach tests are tools that allow the investigator to quantify (fingerprint) which geochemical components could be expected in runoff from these piles if they were leached by a cloudburst...

    A significant disadvantage of DNA fingerprinting that excludes conventional methods of population genetic analysis is an absence of genetic interpretation of hybridization fragment origin.

Forms

plural
fingerprints
past tense
fingerprinted
past participle
fingerprinted
present participle
fingerprinting
third person singular
fingerprints
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).