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What is the soft part of the palm called in English?

I don't know the name even in my native language, so I cannot look it up in the dictionary.

photo of a palm, a red circle is drawn over the fleshy section, at the base of the thumb

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    Might be an idea to hear why you needed this term. In which case users would know if you were specifically looking for a technical or slangy term.
    – Mari-Lou A
    May 23, 2017 at 11:31
  • TIP: Google "hand anatomy" and you should get all the answers you need. Replace hand, with any part of the human body, and Bob's your uncle!
    – Mari-Lou A
    May 23, 2017 at 11:32
  • The danish name for it, is the hand-buttocks (hånd balle). Just a bit of FYI.
    – Clearer
    May 23, 2017 at 13:21
  • @Clearer Thanks! I just googled for "butt of the thumb" and added it to my answer. In English, "butt of the hand" seems to refer to the part of the hand just distal to the wrist, running along both the thenar and hypothenar eminences. From my quick look, the phrase appears most common in explaining the rules of boxing.
    – Ben Kovitz
    May 23, 2017 at 13:34
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    @Mari-Lou, Basically before I came here to ask, I googled "hand anatomy" and I found referring for the bones and muscles, nothing to o with what I wanted:) I needed it for a presentation about position of the palm and using one of its parts.
    – Virtuous Legend
    May 23, 2017 at 14:12

6 Answers 6

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The anatomical term for it is the thenar eminence:

The hand: fingers, creases, and eminences

However, this is a scientific term, known mostly to medical students and doctors. It's not in general use. I had never even heard of it until I started googling just now. A few sources say thenar prominence. If you're wondering, both "eminence" and "prominence" come from a Latin verb meaning to project or stand out, and are often used this way in anatomy. Dictionaries also report thenar as a noun, true to the Greek word (for the whole palm) from which it is taken, but from my quick survey, it appears that today "thenar" is used mainly as an adjective, as in "the thenar crease", "a thenar muscle", "thenar pain", "a thenar pad", "thenar atrophy", and more.*

In common language, it's called the ball of the thumb, the fleshy part of the thumb, the meaty part of the thumb, the base of the thumb, the heel of the thumb, the butt of the thumb, the pulpy part of the thumb, or even the muscley part of the thumb. Since people so rarely talk about it, when people need to refer to it they invent a descriptive phrase on the fly, but often they invent the same phrase. The words "fleshy" and "meaty" suggest its consistency most clearly. People sometimes even independently invent the same word, "muscley". "Muscley" is much rarer than "thenar", and feels awkward and even childish, especially in writing, yet the average person could guess what you meant if you said "the muscley part of your thumb" and would have no idea what you meant if you said "your thenar eminence". (They might take the latter as a compliment.)

Some of these on-the-fly phrases are a little ambiguous, though, since more than one part of the hand on or near the thumb answers to the description, as you can see by googling for those phrases and seeing what people are talking about. This is why doctors and scientists prefer non-vernacular terms taken from Latin or Ancient Greek.

One more term is mount of Venus, which seems to be used only in palmistry. However, outside of palmistry, this term has another meaning, part of a tradition called "landscape pornography".

Pictures from Duke University and this blog.

*Here's my educated guess about what happened (not fully checked out). As "thenar" is a noun in Greek, it was adopted as a noun in Renaissance Latin (e.g. in this translation of a 4th-century Greek medical encyclopedia, where it's defined as "the space between the index finger and the thumb"—not quite the modern meaning). The -ar ending makes it look like a Latin adjective (or an English adjective derived from Latin). It turns out that science and medicine have a lot of occasions for using "thenar" as an adjective, to distinguish various kinds of things: creases, muscles, homologous structures in other animals, etc. So, as the adjectival use gained prominence, its use as a noun atrophied. The noun use is not extinct today—see, for example, here—but its use as a noun seems to have declined starting around 1900, and today "thenar" seems to be most commonly found as a modifier on a noun, most frequently "eminence".

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    The dictionary gives two meanings for "ball of the thumb", that one and the other end, the fleshy area opposite the nail, and I suspect most people would think of the second one, as more ball-like.
    – Michael Lorton
    May 23, 2017 at 6:32
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    +1 for noting that most people don't use the anatomical term in day-to-day speech (which is more than most of the other answers did). Also, I've heard the term heel of the thumb, which I think refers to the same thing.
    – J.R. ♦
    May 23, 2017 at 9:21
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    It might be a regional/cultural thing - ball of the thumb seems well understood in UK. But I just asked a NZ colleague, who didn't recognise it.
    – Toby Speight
    May 23, 2017 at 10:20
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    @BenKovitz "Mount of Venus"? Oh boy, that could lead to some unfortunate misunderstandings...
    – Luaan
    May 23, 2017 at 12:16
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    Great answer. It makes me want to strongly promote usage of the word thenar in everyday conversation. Another nonce-phrase I've heard for this region is the "muscley" part, especially when people are talking about a cramp or other issue that makes it clear that it is a muscle (or rather, group of muscles). It looks ridiculous in print, but gets the idea across. And another anatomical possibility would be something like "the pollicis muscles", since all three muscles there have pollicis in the name, and it's basically Latin for "thumb-related" (but there is one other that's elsewhere).
    – 1006a
    May 23, 2017 at 14:19
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It's called Thenar

Thenar

the soft part of the hand at the base of the thumb

(Cambridge Dictionary)

enter image description here

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  • BTW, the Cambridge Dictionary says it's a noun and then gives an illustration that uses it as an adjective. I've found about 30 uses of thenar outside of dictionaries now, and so far all have used it as an adjective.
    – Ben Kovitz
    May 23, 2017 at 13:39
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    This may be correct, but I'm a 24-year-old American and I've never heard that word before.
    – Tanner Swett
    May 24, 2017 at 11:14
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The part you circled is the "base of the thumb", although I don't think of it as soft, more like "fleshy".

Edit: other answers have suggested "thenar", as a shortening of "thenar eminence". The underlying Greek word θέναρ just means the "palm of the hand", but I doubt anyone who is not either a palmist, a speaker of classical Greek, or a hand-surgeon would recognize the word.

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  • Thank you. Due to reading your answer by googling "fleshy part of the palm" I found that it is called in English "Thenar"
    – Virtuous Legend
    May 23, 2017 at 6:24
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By googling "fleshy part of the palm" I found that it is called in English "Thenar". Based on "Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary© Farlex 2012" The word thenar is a noun, not an adjective. From these dictionaries it seems that there is no need in the additional word eminence.

enter image description here

enter image description here

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    Which means it's really called 'fleshy part of palm'
    – Strawberry
    May 23, 2017 at 11:06
  • @Strawberry -- that's not really a criticism. You call your long-distance viewer a "television", don't you, even though that just the same thing in Latin and Greek.
    – Michael Lorton
    May 23, 2017 at 16:01
  • Regarding whether thenar is an adjective or stands alone as a noun, try looking at real usage. Dictionaries are often wrong, especially about technical or specialized vocabulary. I'm not saying that nobody has ever used thenar as a noun, but it appears to be ordinarily understood as a modifier: the thenar crease, the thenar flap, a thenar muscle, etc. I still haven't found an real example of it used as a noun.
    – Ben Kovitz
    May 23, 2017 at 16:22
  • Notice that two lines after the "Farlex Partner Medical Dictionary" says "This word is a noun, not an adjective", it mentions "thenar eminence", where "thenar" is used as an adjective. Farlex is the company that runs thefreedictionary.com. Their material appears to be aggregated somewhat haphazardly, maybe by computer. They sell an ebook called Complete English Grammar Rules. It's not even plausible that anyone has complete rules for English grammar. As always, even when using reputable dictionaries, check real usage.
    – Ben Kovitz
    May 23, 2017 at 16:52
  • "the thenar of the right hand" books.google.com/…
    – Tᴚoɯɐuo
    May 23, 2017 at 21:35
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Walt Whitman called it the "chuff of your hand" (in "Song of Myself").

This has always stuck with me, but a bit of searching seems to reveal that, surprisingly, nobody else has called it that.

I at least would have understood "chuff", but not "thenar" (well, not until I saw the other answers, anyway.)

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  • Great find! This has to be the best of the nonce phrases.
    – Ben Kovitz
    May 24, 2017 at 16:49
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It is called 'ball of the thumb'.

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