Word.ws English Dictionary

finger bowls

finger bowls is the plural of finger bowl.

Meaning of finger bowl

Noun

finger bowl (plural finger bowls)

  1. A small bowl of warm water placed at each seat at a formal dinner for the guests to rinse their fingers with between courses.
    • In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—punch bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes...1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Cut-Glass Bowl”, in Scribner's Magazine
    Synonyms:
    finger glass

Questions about finger bowls

What is finger bowls the plural of?
Finger bowls is the plural of finger bowl.

Words near finger bowls in the dictionary

  1. finger biscuit
  2. finger biscuits
  3. finger bone
  4. finger bones
  5. finger bowl
  6. finger bowls
  7. finger bread
  8. finger breads
  9. finger breadth
  10. finger brush
  11. finger brushes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: finger bowls (page history and authors); finger bowl (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “finger bowls.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/finger_bowls. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.