Meanings
- rareGiven to fashioning or molding.
He, as the Potter mouldeth on the wheel / The plastic clay, compelled the world to feel / The touch subduing of his fingent hand;
1853, The Trial of the Manchester Bards, and the Bowdon Coronation, page 193 more examples
Goethe, say his censors, has, in the poem in question, placed the Christian religion, with its self-denials and its stern verities, in unfavourable contrast with […] classic heathenism […] with its throng of […] poetic phantoms that made every hill and valley and fountain, every forest-glade and green field and sea-beach, so full of lovely and awful mystery for the busy fingent fancy of the early Greek.
1846 February, [Thomas Carlyle?], “Miscellanea Mystica—No. II”, in The Dublin University Magazine, volume 27, number 158, page 155But most of the time he thought about himself; he was the center of his earth; he could not yet escape into the fingent realm of general ideas.
1923, W. L. George, One of the Guilty, page 16The fingent hands of man! He has caught this eager pose and moulded the dog’s intensest moment in life to his own desires […]
1923, Ralph G. Kirk, Six Breeds, page 41
Origin
- Latinfingēns“shaping, fashioning”
- Englishfingent
Borrowed from Latin fingēns (“shaping, fashioning”).
More words from Latin
Full word history & related roots →Cite this entry
fingent. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fingent
“fingent.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fingent. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “fingent,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/fingent.
Source: fingent on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.