| 释义 |
▪ I. ˈthumb-nail
1. The nail of the thumb. Often in allusive expressions; with quot. 1604 cf. supernaculum.
1604Dekker 1st Pt. Honest Wh. i. v, Cast. Pledge him... Flu. So: I ha done you right on my thumb naile. 1648Herrick Hesper., To his Booke (1869) 228 Be bold, my booke, nor be abasht, or feare The cutting thumb-naile, or the brow severe. 1727Somerville Sweet-scented Miser 27 On his thumb-nail it might be wrote ‘A penny sav'd's a penny got.’ 1841–4Emerson Ess., Nat. Wks. (Bohn) I. 228 The whole code..may be written on the thumbnail.
2. transf. A drawing or sketch of the size of the thumb-nail; hence fig. a brief word-picture. Chiefly attrib., as thumb-nail sketch.
1852E. E. Hale in Sartain's Mag. Jan. 39 (heading) The old and the new, face to face. A thumb-nail sketch. 1900D. Woodside Life H. Calderwood ix. 208 Small ink-sketches of the thumb-nail order. 1901Daily Chron. 3 Jan. 4 (Cass. Suppl.) The truth of Dickens's vignettes and thumb⁓nails of humanity. 1909Westm. Gaz. 4 Jan. 1/3 There are also ‘thumb-nails’ of some French figures, and..little pencil portraits of well-known faces. 1911R. D. Saunders Col. Todhunter 125 A full-length ‘character-cartoon’ of the Colonel surrounded by ‘thumb-nail’ impressions of his face and bodily pose. 1968R. Gittings John Keats xi. 148 He wrote a brilliant thumb-nail sketch of Oxford.
3. thumb-nail scraper (Archæol.), a kind of microlith made for scraping.
1937Garrod & Bate Stone Age of Mt. Carmel I. i. iii. 31 Thumb-nail scraper..a very well-made minute round scraper. 1977G. Clark World Prehist. (ed. 3) v. 226 Late Stone Age assemblages including..microliths and thumb-nail scrapers, which in this part of Africa [sc. Nigeria] were usually made of quartz.
▸ A miniaturized version of a document or part of a document; (Computing) a small version of a digital image, freq. acting as a hyperlink to a larger version.
1933R. T. Porte Dict. Printing Terms 101/1 Thumb-nail layout, a sketch layout in miniature. 1964A. Turnbull Graphics of Communication 176 Thumbnails have three advantages. 1989InfoWorld 16 Jan. 65/1 There are 10 options for audience handouts and speaker's notes. One of these prints thumbnails of 15 bullet charts on a page. 2002Bodleian Libr. Rec. XVII. 285 The images will first be presented as thumbnails, with links to medium-size JPEG-compressed image files.
▪ II. ˈthumb-nail, v.
Also thumbnail.
[f. thumb-nail n.]
trans. To describe concisely by means of a thumb-nail sketch. Also intr.
1932‘T. E. Shaw’ Odyssey of Homer f. 4, He thumb-nailed well; and afterwards lost heart—Nausicaa, for instance, enters dramatically and shapes, for a few lines, like a woman—then she fades, unused. 1942Sphere 15 Aug. 194/4 Among undergraduates he had, of course, a nickname—we called him ‘Blinks’, which adequately thumb-nailed the outer man. 1959Time 10 Aug. 28/2 Thus did Andrew Berding..thumbnail last week the immobility and futility of the Big Four sessions at Geneva. 1983Times 13 June 5/5 The presence of Miss Ride—or 5 ft 5 in, 115 lb, blue-eyed, brunette, cool-hand Sally, as the papers thumbnail her—has created additional interest. |