A well-thumbed book, magazine, dictionary or map is one that has been read and handled so many times that you can see it — soft corners, a cracked spine, grubby marks at the edge of the page where fingers landed, pages that fall open at the owner's favourite place. This is one of my favourite English words, because of what it does. It describes damage, but it means love. A well-thumbed cookbook is worn out because everything in it was worth cooking. A well-thumbed copy of a poet says more about how that person read than any praise could. So although the surface meaning is 'physically worn', the real message is 'used constantly, and treasured'. If you wanted to say a book was simply in bad condition, you would say battered, or falling apart, or in poor condition — those are complaints. Well-thumbed is warm. It belongs to paper, and only to paper. Books, magazines, catalogues, scripts, recipe cards, an old atlas. You cannot have a well-thumbed phone or a well-thumbed website, because there is no thumb touching a page. Writers do sometimes stretch it for a joke, but the joke only works because everyone knows the rule. It has a slightly literary, affectionate flavour — you meet it in book reviews, obituaries, novels, and in the way people talk about things they have kept for years.

翻到破舊的、被反覆翻閱的（書頁磨損，代表常看、珍愛）