Meaning: nail

Illustrative Context

He had very long nails on his fingers.

Target Sense

• The nail as a part of the human body, at the end of a finger.
• Beware the polysemy of English nail: not to be confused with a metal nail for hammering!
• If your language has a generic term for the nails of both fingers and toes, that should be chosen, e.g. English nail.
• If your language has no generic term, then select then the word for the nail of a finger, not a toe.
• Enter only the root that refers to the nail part — avoid entering an additional compounded element that literally means ‘finger’. The correct entry in English is thus nail, not fingernail.
• The term entered should normally be applicable to the nail of a single finger, and will thus normally be a singular form. Avoid collectives, unless that is the default base form in your language, and additional morphology is required to specify a singulative.
• Unlike some previous Swadesh-type lists, IE-CoR distinguishes the ‘nail’ of a human finger from the ‘claw’ of an animal; each is a separate IE-CoR reference meaning. In your language, the lexeme may be the same for both of these IE-CoR meanings (arguably a co-lexification). This is not necessarily a problem, and you should certainly not specifically seek out two different terms to distinguish the two. If both IE-CoR meanings ‘nail’ and ‘claw’ fall within the usage of a single basic lexeme in your language, it is fine to enter that same lexeme as the entry for both IE-CoR meanings, in line with the standard IE-CoR protocol to enter the single most general, basic and default lexeme in your language that also naturally includes in its scope the IE-CoR target sense. See also the entry on the IE-CoR meaning claw.