Glad-hand

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To be overly friendly with (a stranger) in order to gain an advantage. transitive

    "Not in many a moon had he glad-handed so many people. […] The President, in fact, behaved noticeably like a candidate for reelection."

  2. 2
    To extend a glad hand (to someone); to welcome warmly.

Example

More examples

"Not in many a moon had he glad-handed so many people. […] The President, in fact, behaved noticeably like a candidate for reelection."

Related phrases

glad-hander

More for "glad-hand"

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.