In my native language, there is no word for toes. You just use the same word for both toes and fingers. In this context, I would say a human has 20 fingers.
Recently I've heard someone saying a human has 10 fingers (without saying it out loud but assuming that the other 10 are toes and not fingers).
Can I use fingers when referring to toes? Would saying that a human has 20 fingers make sense, in English?
Best Answer
Nope. Fingers are only on the hand, except for figurative uses such as ladyfingers (a dessert). If you talk about the fingers on someone's foot, or a person with 20 fingers, unfortunately you'll just generate unsettling mental images. :)
As smci points out, to refer to the ensemble, people will often say "fingers and toes". This is a so-called "Siamese twin" phrase: the two words love to be paired and the order can't be reversed.
We do also have a single word that covers both fingers and toes: digits. It registers as a somewhat technical term, likely something your doctor would write in a report about an injury. I think most people would understand it in other contexts anyway, though some speakers might not realize that it can apply to toes, probably because of the influence of "finger". (Also, someone's "digits" is a way of referring to their phone number.)
A third alternative is "appendages", which everyone will understand, but which is usually too broad (see comments below) and simply sounds funny when used of regular human body parts.