Fingerfehler
A casual term, borrowed from German, for a blunder caused by a slip of the hand rather than a mistaken calculation, such as touching or releasing the wrong piece.
A fingerfehler is distinguished from an ordinary blunder in that the player usually knew the correct move but physically executed a different one.
Etymology
Fingerfehler is a German compound of Finger and Fehler meaning mistake, and names a move played by accident of the hand rather than of judgement, the piece going to the wrong square while the player intended something else. Wikipedia's Glossary of chess glosses it as from German, finger mistake. The German Wikipedia article states that the expression comes from chess jargon and was possibly borrowed from the language of music, and that it has passed from German into international chess vocabulary. That article gives no earliest attestation for the word itself; the oldest dated case it cites is Lindemann against Echtermeyer, Kiel 1893, reported in the Deutsche Schachzeitung of September 1893. It cites Manfred van Fondern's Lexikon fuer Schachfreunde (1980) among its literature. There is no English Wiktionary entry, no DWDS entry, and no entry in Edward Winter's Earliest Occurrences of Chess Terms.
First documented: n.a. (oldest dated example cited is the game Lindemann-Echtermeyer, Kiel 1893) — n.a. for the word; de.wikipedia cites Deutsche Schachzeitung, September 1893, for the Lindemann-Echtermeyer example
Translations
Translations for this term haven't been added yet.