- 1頂針（縫紉時套在手指上的護指套）。台灣的長輩也常說「針箍」（台語）。注意不是「戒指」，雖然長得像。
A thimble is a small hard cap that you put over the end of your finger — almost always the middle finger — when you by hand. When you push a needle through cloth, the back end of the needle presses into your finger, and if the cloth is thick, that hurts, or the needle slips. The thimble takes the push instead of your skin. Old ones are metal, usually with tiny dents all over the surface so the end of the needle catches in a dent and does not slide off; newer ones can be plastic or leather. It is a small, thing, and for most people now it belongs to a grandmother's basket rather than to daily life, so English speakers meet the word more often in stories, in the game Monopoly (a thimble used to be one of the little metal pieces), and in the phrase for a very small amount, than in real . Because a thimble holds almost nothing, people also use it as a picture of tininess: a of whisky. There is a second, technical sense you may see in engineering or on boats — a metal ring fitted inside a loop of rope or cable to stop it wearing through — but that one is specialist, and a will very rarely need it.
組成thumb + -le. The -le ending here is the old suffix that makes the name of a tool (as in handle, something you hold by). So the word is literally 'the thumb thing' — Old English þȳmel — even though in practice people wear it on the middle finger now, not the thumb. The b in thumb was never pronounced; thimble picked up its b the same way thumb did, from scribes rather than from speech.
原始詞典資料9 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
thimblenoun/ˈθɪmb(ə)l/
- 1
businessmanufacturingsewingA pitted, now usually metal, cup-shaped cap worn on the tip of a finger, which is used in sewing to push the needle through material.
- She had worn a hole through her silver thimble, and wanted Owen to repair it.
- 2
As much as fills a thimble (sense 1); a thimbleful.
- 3
gamesAn object which resembles a thimble (sense 1) in shape or size.
- 4
engineeringnatural-sciencesphysical-sciencesAn object which resembles a thimble (sense 1) in shape or size.
- 5
nauticaltransportA metal ring which a cable or rope intended for attaching to other things is looped around as a protection against chafing.
- To relieve the stern in a measure from the great weight of the [diving-]bell, a short, strong mast was stepped in the usual place, and steeving forward; from its head to the head of the davit was a span, which set up with two thimbles [footnote: A sort of iron ring.] and a lanyard, and the whole was supported by a strong stay from the mast-head to the stern of the boat, and two shrouds on a side, leading forward.
- The rope part is fitted with a thimble in one end, which is connected to the chain by means of a shackle; the other extremity is spliced around a heart, and goes with a laniard, as in the case of bobstays. The splice of the thimble and the heart should be served.
- 6
engineeringnatural-sciencesphysical-sciencesA ring- or tube-shaped component such as a ferrule.
- 7
obsoleteA watch (timepiece).
- One of them had the address, whilst his Majesty was shaking hands with one of his 'Pall-Mall' acquaintances, to slip his hand under his upper tog [coat] and extract his thimble [watch] […]
thimbleverb/ˈθɪmb(ə)l/
- 1
To use a thimble (noun sense 1).
- 2
To sew.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。