thumb

1
as in to hitch
to travel by securing free rides thought I'd thumb into town instead of paying for a cab

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2
as in to flip
to turn over pages in an idle or cursory manner I thumbed through the book during the flight but was too distracted to really read it

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Antonyms & Near Antonyms

Example Sentences

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
Recent Examples of thumb The Manchester-by-the-Sea health board has thumbed its nose at voters with callous indifference. Peter Brennan, Boston Herald, 26 May 2025 On the heels of a 22-year attendance high and a TV ratings surge that thumbed its nose at the cord-cutting trends, the WNBA heads back to the court with a mission to convert even more casual observers into fans than was the case a year ago. Anthony Crupi, Sportico.com, 16 May 2025 The state planned to keep its gender-eligibility policy to allow biological males to compete against females in sports, thumbing its nose at President Donald Trump's executive order. Ryan Gaydos, FOXNews.com, 6 May 2025 Navratilova on Thursday posed a question to Democrats as some states have continued to thumb their nose at President Donald Trump’s executive order to keep males out of girls’ and women’s sports. Ryan Gaydos, FOXNews.com, 10 Apr. 2025 See All Example Sentences for thumb
Recent Examples of Synonyms for thumb
Verb
  • Boomers’ children aren’t getting hitched as easily, and those who do are less likely to split up.
    Spencer Kornhaber, The Atlantic, 20 June 2025
  • At Newfound Gap, folks often hitch northwest down U.S. 441, toward their first day off in Gatlinburg, Tenn.
    Grayson Haver Currin, Outside Online, 20 June 2025
Verb
  • But Republicans will be vying for the seats as well in the hopes of flipping one of the seats and helping the GOP hold onto their razor-thin majority in the House.
    Olivia Olander, Chicago Tribune, 24 June 2025
  • Two teens are dead and three others remain seriously injured Monday after their car flipped over in a crash and slid into oncoming traffic in Pompano Beach on Friday night.
    Angie DiMichele, Sun Sentinel, 24 June 2025
Verb
  • The graduate is not only bummed about the sister’s absence.
    Brian Anthony Hernandez, People.com, 25 May 2025
  • Everyone — from those actually paying to the ones still bumming a log-in — wants to know how Netflix and other streaming services’ crackdowns on password sharing affect them.
    Savannah Salazar, Vulture, 20 May 2025
Verb
  • This is because of the increasing demands for networking and switches to connect exponentially larger clusters, from spine to leaf in the front end and back end, rack to rack and accelerator to accelerator.
    Beth Kindig, Forbes, 19 Dec. 2024
  • Such a cacophony means that the reader keeps having to leaf back to make sense of the storyline.
    Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books, 30 Mar. 2023
Verb
  • Four years into his prison sentence, Manchester escaped from an Anson County prison and hitchhiked to Charlotte.
    Sydney Sasser, Charlotte Observer, 26 June 2025
  • The towers could allow some of their members to reach new places or to hitchhike on other organisms such as fruit flies.
    Jacek Krywko, Scientific American, 5 June 2025
Verb
  • That bill, House Bill 436, gives a pathway for emergency services to withdraw from urban renewal agencies, which skim new revenue from rising property values and new development and uses that money to help fund more projects.
    Nick Rosenberger, Idaho Statesman, 13 June 2025
  • For most locations, the upper limb of the moon will skim to within about 20 arc minutes (one-third of a degree) of Mars.
    Joe Rao, Space.com, 13 June 2025

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Cite this Entry

“Thumb.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/thumb. Accessed 2 Jul. 2025.

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