Butterfingers is a compound of butter + fingers, jocularly suggesting fingers as slippery as if greased with butter, so that things slip from one's grasp; 19th-century coinage. The historical trail runs through butere in Old English. Morphologically, butterfingers is transparent: it is a compound of butter + fingers, jocularly suggesting fingers as slippery as if greased with butter, so that things slip from one's grasp. Used as a noun, butterfingers now means "a clumsy person who frequently drops things", so the present definition can be read against the older forms and meanings. The same lexical family is also visible in related forms such as butter and fingers. The modern word remains analyzable through its parts, which makes the semantic connection unusually direct.