fat-finger

English

Alternative forms

• fat finger, fatfinger

Etymology

fat + finger, the implication being that a person who fat-fingers does so because his or her fingers are too fat to strike a key without accidentally simultaneously striking a neighboring key.

Verb

fat-finger (third-person singular simple present fat-fingers, present participle fat-fingering, simple past and past participle fat-fingered)

1. (transitive, informal) To make errors in typing on a keyboard or keypad by accidentally striking more than one key simultaneously with one finger.
   • 1995 September 8, “US West software update disconnects online users”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

     Another Sprint employee speculated that someone might have fatfingered the keyboard.

   • 2008 August 24, “DNS: Patched but not totally fixed”, TechRepublic: 

     However the other day I fatfingered a web request and got a Charter Communicationsnot found result page

   • 2010 May 06, Jennie Runevitch, “Source of stocks' plunge investigated”, wthr.com, Indianapolis:

     "Evidently, someone said they 'fat-fingered' a trade, meaning they accidentally put it in for billions instead of millions," Snyder said.

See also

• typo