![wearing a ring on your thumb wearing a ring on your thumb](https://i1.wp.com/sokolov.net/upload/images/blog/ru-ru/moda/hands/miz-1-750.jpg)
The ring was then left on the ring finger. In medieval Europe, during the Christian wedding ceremony the ring was placed in sequence on the thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers of the left hand. Blessing the wedding ring and putting it on the bride's finger dates from the 11th century. This developed from the Roman anulus pronubis when a man would give a ring to the woman at their betrothal ceremony. In Western cultures, a wedding ring is traditionally worn on the fourth digit, commonly called the "ring finger". In Britain, only women tended to wear a wedding ring until after the World Wars, when married male soldiers started to wear rings to remind them of their partner. By wearing the ring on the fourth digit of the left hand, a married couple symbolically declares their eternal love for each other. īased upon this name, their contemporaries, purported experts in the field of matrimonial etiquette, wrote that it would only be fitting that the wedding ring be worn on this digit.
![wearing a ring on your thumb wearing a ring on your thumb](https://images.ctfassets.net/r8zziopvbqla/5aWM33hO7fsYUic4eDvbxe/5d2d8b3f6b450ce9cdca38ac07a38bca/1-Main-4.jpg)
Because of the hand–heart connection, they chose the descriptive name vena amoris, Latin for the vein of love, for this particular vein.
![wearing a ring on your thumb wearing a ring on your thumb](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/0c/73/ae/0c73aef300c8486e7820dd8c6ac25e9d.png)
History īefore medical science discovered how the circulatory system functioned, people believed that a vein ran directly from the fourth digit on the left hand to the heart. In Arabic and Hebrew, the ring finger is called respectively – bansur (meaning "victory") – and kmitsa (meaning "taking a handful"). In Sanskrit and other languages like Finnish or Russian, the ring finger is called respectively - "Anamika", "nimetön" and "Безымянный" ("nameless"). In Japanese it is called 薬指 ( kusuri yubi, "medicine finger"), deriving its name from the fact that it was frequently used when taking traditional powdered medicine, as it was rarely used otherwise and hence was considered the cleanest of all. It is named after magic or rings, or called nameless (for example, in Chinese: 無名指 / 无名指 pinyin: wúmíng zhǐ lit. Magyar, the names of the ring finger in many languages reflect an ancient belief that it is a magical finger. The origin of the selection of the fourth digit as the ring finger is not definitively known. 3.2 Middle Eastern, Jewish and South Asian customs.