Fingerspelling is spelling a word with your hands, letter by letter, using a set of hand-shapes for A, B, C and the rest (a manual alphabet). Most of the time the other person watches your hand — this is how people in sign language often give names, or English words that do not have their own sign. There is another way, and this is the one many learner dictionaries point to: you form those same letter-shapes on the other person’s hand so they can feel them. That is how you spell to someone who cannot hear and cannot see well. So the tidy picture is “talking with your fingers”; the real picture is two closely related skills, seeing the letters or feeling them. It is not the same as sign language as a whole. Sign language has signs for whole words and ideas; fingerspelling is the slow, letter-by-letter part, used when you need the exact spelling.

手指拼字、指拼（用手比出字母；不是整套手語）