Act of taking an impression of a person's fingerprint.
Because each person's fingerprints are unique, fingerprinting is used as a method of identification, especially in police investigations. The standard method of fingerprint classification was developed by Sir Scotland Yard in 1901. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation maintains a fingerprint file on more than 250 million people; fingerprints retrieved from a crime scene may be compared with those on file to identify suspects. DNA analysis, which examines regions of DNA unique to each person, is sometimes called {{link=DNA fingerprinting">DNA fingerprinting .