A playground for words.

I’m currently teaching myself Spanish. While learning the names for each finger, I was delighted to discover that toes are dedos del pie—literally “fingers of the foot.” It made me notice how readily English names the fingers of a hand, while the toes mostly make do with numbers and positions, apart from “big toe” and sometimes “little toe.”

Invent five English names, from big toe to little toe. They can echo thumb, index, middle, ring, and pinky—or follow an entirely different logic. I’m interested in the whole scheme: its metaphor, sound, usefulness, and the reasoning that holds it together.

If the small finger is a pinky, might his footbound cousin be a tonky? I’m not proposing that as the right answer, or suggesting the best names must follow this pattern—just showing one way to play through the metaphor between hand and foot.