A post set up at the parting of roads, with one or more arms, often terminating in the shape of a finger, to indicate the directions of the several roads; a guide-post.
1789. Mrs. Piozzi, Journ. France, II. 291. The words Route de Belgrade upon a finger-post gave me sensations of distance never felt before.
1857. Toulm. Smith, Parish, 357–8. The Highway Surveyors ought to put up fingerposts where two or more roads meet, and in other places where they are likely to help travellers.
transf. and fig. 1793. Beddoes, Math. Evid., 158. It had pleased him to christen the pronouns, the finger-posts of language.
1857. Stanley, Mem. Canterb., i. 31. So many finger-posts, pointing your thoughts, along various roads, to times and countries far away.
b. slang. (See quot.)
1785. Grose, Dict. Vulg. Tongue, Finger Post. A parson: so called, because like the finger post, he points out a way he has never been, and probably will never go, i. e. the way to heaven.
Hence Finger-posted ppl. a., having a finger-post; in quot. fig. Finger-postless a., without a finger-post.
1885. H. O. Forbes, Nat. Wand. E. Archip., 88. Here then we have an orchid whose flowers present every attraction to insects to pay at least a first visit (when they would find no nectar), all of them gay, with a nectary, and a beautifully painted and finger-posted labellum, yet rarely possible to be anything but self-fertilised.
1873. Miss Broughton, Nancy, III. ix. 147. We are therefore, entangled in a labyrinth of cross-roads—finger-postless, guideless, solitary.
