Extra Digits

We all know the problem here... The bottle that appears in the take!

"You have six fingers on your right hand. Someone was looking for you."

— Westley to Count Rugen, The Princess Bride

If you want to emphasize that your character is somehow "different" from everyone else, you can underline this by giving them a physical deformity; one of the most popular options is extra digits. The reason for this choice is simple: unlike many other deformities which look "obviously wrong" and therefore repulsive at first sight, a sixth finger or a toe may look perfectly normal and not be noticeable unless one deliberately counts them.

Depending on the Writer, it can be either an obvious defect (probably symbolizing covert malignity of the person) or a Sexy Flaw emphasizing how adorably unconventional the character is. It may also serve a functional purpose: with extra digits, the character may be able to do something no one else can (like playing certain piano compositions). Often, it is relevant to the plot because it reveals that a character is secretly related to another character with the same trait, or it otherwise says something about their ancestry. It can also serve to distinguish the character if a description of them is necessary: if you're looking for a six-fingered man, it's easier to just say that than to describe features such as age and hair color that could apply to lots of people.

Non-human entities, animals or monsters do not qualify for this trope, with the exception of human-like species who are only distinguished from humans by a different number of digits.

Contrast Four-Fingered Hands, which is usually just used in animation to make human hands easier to draw, and Off-Model, where a character may be accidentally given this trait in an animation error.

In Real Life, this condition is called polydactyly. Sometimes the finger is just a flesh stub, but in rarer cases, it's an actual, functional sixth finger. In the latter case, this condition is actually Cursed with Awesome: studies show that people with functional sixth fingers are able to perform tasks better than the others, and develop extra brain functions.

Interestingly, extra digits are actually a dominant trait over the recessive five digits. This is likely due to the fact that the earliest tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) actually had as many as eight digits per limb, though later tetrapods reduced it to a maximum of five. The genes to create extra digits remain, but are inactive.

For more prurient examples of extra body parts, see Multiboobage and Triple Nipple. For aliens see Spare Body Parts. A race with a different amount of digits is likely to use an Alternative Number System.

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Examples

Advertising

• A well-known blooper in the 1957 Hornby-Dublo catalogue: the father is drawn with an extra finger.
• In the late 1960s/early 1970s, an ad for class rings produced by the Herff-Jones company showed a ring on the foot of a person with six normal-looking toes.

Anime & Manga

• Chainsaw Man: The Hell Devil has six fingers on its hand, which is usually the only part of it we see. Oddly, when it's summoned in full later on, its centauroid form has Four-Fingered Hands.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • From Stardust Crusaders, Osiris, the Stand of Daniel J. D'Arby, has six fingers on each hand.
  • In Stone Ocean, when Ermes Costello is first discovering her duplication powers, she accidentally uses it on one of her fingers, briefly giving her a sixth, to her horror.

Comic Books

• Daredevil: Tenfingers is a Chinatown crime boss with ten fingers on each hand.
• Irredeemable: The Plutonian's birth parents are Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who have six fingers on each hand. Tony himself grows an extra digit on each hand when he learns the truth and jumps up an Evolutionary Level.

Comic Strips

• In The Addams Family, both the daughter◊ and the uncle◊ (OK, call them Wednesday and Fester if you want) both had them in certain comics.
• The Pattersons' neighbor Anne Nichols from For Better or for Worse has three children. The youngest, Leah, was born with six fingers on both hands. Anne has the extra fingers surgically removed shortly after birth.

Fan Works

• Patrick Pines, the main protagonist of the Gravity Falls fanfic Weirder Things, was born with six toes on both feet. He was mocked about it by the other kids, which caused him to have anger issues. In fact, according to the 12th chapter, Mabel almost teased Patrick about his toes, which upset Stan (since it reminded him of Ford), and he told her to knock it off, even threatening to ground her.

Films — Animation

• Big Nose the pub thug in Tangled reveals he has six toes on his left foot in the song "I've Got a Dream" when singing about being a hopeless romantic.
• Zigzag the Grand Vizier in The Thief and the Cobbler has six fingers on each hand, perhaps to show that he's a master manipulator.
• The Blue Meanies from Yellow Submarine have six-fingered hands to emphasize their overall evilness.

Films — Live-Action

• Implied with Gomez and/or Fester in The Addams Family: Gomez tells Fester that the combination lock for the vault is "2, 10, 11—eyes, fingers, toes". In the original comics, Gomez's daughter Wednesday was shown to have 6 toes on one foot as well.
• The Na'vi in Avatar have Four-Fingered Hands, so the Avatars retaining the human appendage number is seen as this by them. In the sequel, there is some prejudice at those whose five fingers make it clear they're hybrids.
• In Bruce Almighty, Bruce has God say how many fingers he has extended behind his back so the latter can prove his identity. At one point Bruce tries to pull a trick where he initially extends seven fingers (all five on his right hand and two on his left) only to abruptly close the two fingers on his left hand. God says seven, and Bruce holds up his right hand with a smug "Hah!", only to see that his right hand suddenly has seven fingers. The extra fingers immediately disappear after Bruce frantically shakes his hand around.
• In Gattaca, the protagonist and his girlfriend at one point see a concert by a pianist who was genetically engineered to have twelve fingers. There are apparently enough people like this around that some pieces of piano music require extra fingers to play.
• Douzi from Farewell My Concubine was born with a sixth finger. At the beginning of the film, his prostitute mother begs the opera school to take him, and when they refuse due to his sixth finger, she drags Douzi out into an alley and chops it off with a cleaver. She then drags him back, they take him, and she's never seen again.
• In Good Burger, when Ed and Dexter hang out with each other on the roof of the titular fast-food restaurant, Dexter asks Ed if he has any real problems. Ed tells him that he has six toes on his left foot.
• Though he made his big screen debut in Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith, General Grievous was already shown beforehand to have hands that had two thumbs on either side of the palm, and his cybernetics famously allowed him to split his arms into four arms in all (each with two fingers and a thumb). This was something of a weird subversion, since his species has hands with two thumbs and two fingers, his cyborg body gave him an extra set of fingers to work with when he was using the two-arm configuration.
• Svaha: The Sixth Finger: The mark of the evil cult leader is that he has six fingers on each hand, hence the movie's title. The henchman that is eventually revealed to be The Man in Front of the Man is revealed by showing six fingers on his hand as he's steering the wheel of a car.
• Wrong Way Butch: A random gag in a comic short film about workplace safety in a factory. Butch drives a chisel through the toe of his shoe. The shoe being nailed to the floor, he pulls his foot out, and confirms that his toes are unharmed. All six of them.

Literature

• In The Chrysalids, Sophie has six toes on both her feet, which in the theology of the main character's Sinister Minister father Joseph Strorm, marks her as an inhuman Blasphemy created by Satan.
• In Danny, the Champion of the World, Danny's father mentions that Mrs. Snoddy is a sort of witch; and to prove it, she has seven toes on each foot.
• In The Secret of Castle Cant, the protagonist Lucy also has six toes on her feet. This is a sign of her royal ancestry.
• In The Jewel of Seven Stars, Queen Tera was born with seven fingers on one hand and seven toes on one foot; that's why the number had a mystical meaning for her.
• In Red Dragon and its sequels, Hannibal Lecter has six fingers on his left hand, as a metaphor for "being a monster" (and also a great boon to his piano skills). He uses this to his advantage when hiding an improvised handcuff key in his right hand, knowing the officer's attention will be on his unusual left hand. This detail was cut from the movies and TV shows.
• In both the book and film versions of The Princess Bride, the evil Count Rugen has six fingers on his right hand, and a sword specially made to be usable with his extra digit plays a significant role in the plot.
• In A Song of Ice and Fire, King Aegon II Targaryen's son Jaehaerys had six fingers on his left hand and six toes on each foot due to the Targaryen family history of Royal Inbreeding.
• Jack, the titular character of The Twelve-Fingered Boy, who also has psychic powers.
• The Contortionist's Handbook is about a talented young forger with six fingers on his left hand, a handicap considering he constantly changes his identity in order to escape discovery.
• In A Clockwork Fairytale, members of royalty are identified by having six toes on their feet; this is how the protagonist understands that Melba is the missing princess.
• In A Brother's Price, part of the Porter family is polydactyl, with an extra toe on one foot. This tips off Eldest Whistler to the paternity of Kij's daughter, Eldie, who was sired by Kij's brother Keifer. While Keifer was married to the princesses.
• In Neil Gaiman's short story "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" one of the girls has an extra finger, by which she notes her alien culture prohibits her from reproduction because it's a defect. The protagonist, who is just trying to get off with someone, ignores the context and just notes the finger as an interesting feature.
• In Across a Billion Years by Robert Silverberg, the protagonist's Love Interest Jan Mortenson has six toes on both feet, 40 teeth, and some other minor differences from humans due to being a half-blood (three-quarters human and one quarter alien). The protagonist sees this as a Charm Point.
• In Tales of Three Lands series by Linda Smith, there are two very similar races: the Uglessians and the Freyans. The Uglessians' only difference is that they have magical abilities and six-fingered hands.
• In All the Fishes Come Home to Roost: An American Misfit in India, the beautiful Indian piligrim Freyni Dadachanji has six toes on both of her feet.
• In Alice, Girl from the Future, Iria Gai has 6 toes on her feet because she is actually an alien from the planet Vester (this planet's inhabitants are distinguished from humans by their lilac eyes and 12 toes).
• In Artemis Fowl: The Last Guardian, when Artemis's original body is destroyed, his spirit resides in a clone made by Foaly; the clone has six toes on his left foot.
• Warrior Cats:
  • The former official app noted that Blackstar has six toes on one paw.
  • In the sixth series, the Clans receive an omen that says they must find a cat with a six-toed paw. This cat ends up being the loner, Tree. We also discover in Tree's Roots that Tree's father, Root, had a six-toed paw too, and it's one of the things that helped the two realize that they were father and son.
  • As noted in the Real Life section, this is in fact fairly common in cats.
• Redwall: In Outcast of Redwall, Swartt Sixclaw has six claws on his left paw. His son Veil accurately inherits this.
• Vorkosigan Saga: On Barrayar, accusing someone of having extra digits is regarded as a major insult, due to their cultural horror of mutations and deformities.
• In the Darkover series, some humans who have chieri ancestors have five fingers plus a thumb on their hands, as do the chieri themselves.
• Lilith's Brood: The Cthulhumanoid alien Oankali have sixteen fingers and two thumbs on each hand, thanks in part to their ongoing genetic manipulation of themselves as a species. Humans tend to find the arrangement creepy, but not nearly as much as their Eyeless Faces and anemone-like tentacles.
• Revealed about Banjo very late in Hogfather:
  Susan: Can you count, Banjo?
  Banjo: Yes, miss. On m'fingers, miss.
  Susan: So you can count up to... ?
  Banjo: Thirteen, miss.
• The Brazilian novel Twelve Fingers: Biography of an Anarchist, as made clear by the English title, is about an assassin with extra index fingers. Which are part of his clumsiness - for instance, in one of many historical events he stumbles by, when face to face with Franz Ferdinand, he shoves both fingers into the trigger guard and thus fails to shoot, so by the time he looks again, Gavrilo Princip has done the deed and started World War I.

Live-Action TV

• Marla Bevers from Broad City has an eleventh toe, although it's "not where you would expect it to be." It's on her right side.
• One season finale of Empty Nest has Harry, Carol, and Barbara going to England for a family ceremony. Just before they leave, Barbara mentions Carol having been born with eleven toes. When they get to the castle, they meet a butler who also has eleven toes. Later, Harry gets lost in the dungeon and stumbles upon a skeleton who also has eleven toes.
• The unseen character Angela Valentine in Leave It to Beaver was said to have an extra toe (without a fingernail) before her parents had it cut off.
• In Monk, Frank Nunn, the hitman who placed the bomb that killed Monk's wife Trudy had six fingers.
• The Outer Limits (1963) episode "The Sixth Finger". When a man experiences accelerated evolution, he develops an enlarged head and a sixth finger on each hand.
• A parody commercial from Saturday Night Live advertises a finger removal cream for people with extra fingers.
• Star Trek: Enterprise once mentions Nuvian masseuses, who have twelve fingers. On each hand.
• One episode of The X-Files starts with a girl who's shown to have six toes on her feet. The case becomes about the mysterious deaths of several girls (including this one) born with six digits on all four limbs (some had the extra fingers removed to better fit in).

Music

• "Burli" by the Austrian fun band Erste Allgemeine Verunsicherung. Burli was born after a havary in a nuclear plant, and polydactyly is the least of his abnormities. No need to go into the saucy details...

Religion

• The Bible speaks of a huge man who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot in 2 Samuel 21:20 and in 1 Chronicles 20:6.

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons & Dragons, the demon prince Graz'zt has six fingers on each hand, regardless of what form he takes. A hand with six fingers is his symbol, and his cults include the League of Six Rings in the Forgotten Realms.

Video Games

• Batman: Arkham Knight: One of the dead bodies Batman examines in the "Perfect Crime" side quest has six fingers on one hand.
• In Clandestiny, Andrew has "the mark of the MacPhiles", which is six fingers on each hand.
• Tallis in Dragon Age II says she has six toes on her left foot, though this is never actually seen.
• In Fallout 2, the Chosen One can mutate a sixth toe from spending long enough in toxic waste unprotected. Having one will result in failing the physical of the Vault City citizenship test, unless it is amputated by an Auto Doc and acquired as an item.
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: If the protagonist has the Extra Fingers augment, they become more dextrous, granting them 10 Creativity and a bonus 1 point for Creativity and Organization skill gains.
• inFAMOUS: Second Son: According to one of the in-game tidbits, Hank Daughtry has six toes on his right foot.
• The player character in Outer Wilds belongs to a race of blue, four-eyed aliens with only two fingers and a thumb on each hand. Except for fellow astronaut Riebeck, who has three.

Visual Novels

• In Umineko: When They Cry, Kinzo has six toes which is used to identify his corpse. They're also shared by his bastard child Sayo Yasuda/Lion Ushiromiya, who had them amputated to try and hide their true identity after they were assumed dead, but it left scars that Kinzo noticed and clued him in to their relationship. Interestingly none of Kinzo's legitimate children seem to have inherited this trait, which may or may not be because Kinzo was Sayo/Lion's father and grandfather.

Webcomics

• Played With in The Order of the Stick. Humans/Elves/Dwarfs/Halflings/Goblins, etc. are all drawn with three digits per hand. One on each side and one in the centre, looking kind of like the number "3" or a "W". When a mimic assumes human form, it has five-digited normal real-world human hands, with four fingers and a distinct thumb, which the other characters think looks weird and freakish.

Websites

• Nobody Here: Part of the Body Horror in "Toes" involves Jogchem growing extra toes.
• Various online image-generator sites such as Midjourney and DALL-E have become infamous for rendering people with too many fingers and toes, often disconnected or articulated in impossible ways. These generators use probabilistic algorithms based on huge collections of images, rather than having any actual model of human anatomy. A finger or toe is usually next to another finger or toe in a real picture. So the generators just keep adding them...

Western Animation

• In The Legend of Korra, the Triple Threat Triad firebender "Two Toed" Ping has an extra toe on each foot. He wanted to be called Twelve Toed Ping, but there was already someone with that nickname in Republic City.
• Aunt Ruth from the The Loud House episode, "Two Boys and a Baby" is revealed to have an eleventh toe.
  • Child Prodigy Lisa Loud is revealed to have an extra toe in a later episode, thanks to a nuclear experiment gone wrong.
• In Gravity Falls, the author of the journals, Stanford Pines, has six fingers on each hand. Word of God jokingly confirmed in a reddit AMA that he also has six toes on each foot. This is notable further because he has a twin who doesn't have these features, which is highly improbable if not impossible.
  Mabel: Woah, a six-fingered handshake! It's a full finger friendlier than normal!
• In Clarence, Jeff has an extra toe that he's self-conscious about. When Clarence learns about this, Jeff becomes very worried that his secret might get out.
• Billy, the elderly giant barbarian hero from Adventure Time, has 6 fingers on each hand.
• Done as a gag on the Tex Avery MGM Cartoon "The Hick Chick". A chicken complains that her dance partner has twenty toes, a '40s slang term for a bad dancer. Naturally, Avery takes the line literally, showing the rooster with ten toes on each foot (and human feet as well).
  • A similar gag was done in "Billy Boy", where the titular goat eats off the farmer's shoe. To his relief, he still has the ten toes on his foot.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle: Several characters have them at various times, but the most prominent example is the seven-fingered Snow White in "Snow White Inc."
• Glossaryck from Star vs. the Forces of Evil has six fingers and six toes. Like with many cartoon examples, it's weird because the other characters still have only four fingers.
• In Tangled: The Series, Corona's former King Robin the Eleventh is called that for having eleven fingers. In "Fitzherbert P.I.", when a thief steals his portrait and leaves a fake one, the switch is noticed because King Robin is portrayed as having only ten digits in the fake one.
• The Gem Fusion Lemon Jade in Steven Universe has four upper arms that merge on either side into two forearms, and the hands each have six fingers.
• The Simpsons sometimes play with Four-Fingered Hands by treating five fingers as unusual. God is consistently drawn with five fingers. In "Lady Bouvier's Lover", Homer worries that if his father and Marge's mother get married, they'll become siblings, and their kids will instantly become mutants with "five fingers on each hand!"

Real Life

• A whole family from Brazil who have six fingers and toes as an inherited genetic trait. They consider it a positive anomaly; in fact, it is the family members with regular number of digits who feel "left out".
• Another family in India has the same, but are less proud of it because prospective husbands of the daughters dislike it.
• A Twitch streamer, Polydactyl66 has her brand built around the fact that she has a sixth fully-formed and functional finger on each hand. Her left thumb is also split in a Y shape from its knuckle and has two nails. More recently, she plays with a keyboard cam so viewers can more easily confirm that she does indeed have six fingers.
• Anne Boleyn was posthumously claimed to have had six fingers on one hand by Catholic propagandists who considered it a sign of witchcraft. One more neutral biographer claimed that people who knew Anne had told him that she had a split or duplicated fingernail on one finger, which may have been exaggerated into a sixth finger.
• The actress Gemma Arterton, one of the Bond girls, was born with six fingers on both hands (they were surgically removed shortly after). In her own words: "It's my little oddity that I'm really proud of it. It makes me different".
• Former MLB relief pitcher Antonio Alfonseca was known for having 6 digits on both his hands and feet.
• West Indian cricketer Garfield Sobers, considered the greatest all-rounder^note a player skilled enough at batting and bowling to earn a place in the starting Xi in either role in the sport's history, was born with an extra finger on each hand. The extras were surgically removed when he was an infant.
• Hrithik Roshan has three thumbs; sometimes this is shown incidentally in his films, meaning a few of his characters do as well.
• Indian heptathlete and Asiad gold medalist Swapna Barman has six toes on each foot. Her condition made her initially unable to run with shoes since she couldn't afford a pair large enough, and nearly got her disqualified from the Asian Games until Nike offered to sponsor her with a custom pair of shoes.
• There is a related congenital condition, Triphalangeal Thumb, where the thumb is developed with a third phalanx. Depending on the expression of how the "thumb" is developed, it can give the appearance of a hand with five (or more) unopposable fingers, but no thumb.
• Cats with polydactyly are surprisingly common in real life. Ernest Hemingway kept several, and as it's an inheritable trait, their descendants can still be found around his old house in Key West. This trait is especially common in Maine Coons.
• Both the giant panda and the unrelated red panda have an enlarged bone on their forepaw that acts as an extra digit, allowing them to easily grasp bamboo.
• Polydactyly is actually ancestral to tetrapods, as Early Devonian tetrapods such as Ichthyostega could have up to seven digits on each limb. These were later lost in future generations.
• Icthyosaurs, dolphin-like marine reptiles of the Mesozoic period, had as many as ten digits on each foreflipper. What's more, while most vertebrates only have three or four bones in each digit, icthyosaurs had as many as twelve, causing their flipper bones to look like some bizarre corncob instead of a recognizable "hand" as in cetaceans.

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