Handfeed

verb

verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Verb
  1. 1
    To feed by hand.

    "Walker only saw the place in its deceitful summer promise, when the corn, whose husks were never to fill, was waving in sunshine, when the potato-fields, which were to yield nothing but dwarfed and rotten tubercles, were still gay in blossom, and the cattle, which for nine months of the year have to be housed and handfed with more tenderness than their masters, were luxuriating in sunny grass."

Example

More examples

"Walker only saw the place in its deceitful summer promise, when the corn, whose husks were never to fill, was waving in sunshine, when the potato-fields, which were to yield nothing but dwarfed and rotten tubercles, were still gay in blossom, and the cattle, which for nine months of the year have to be housed and handfed with more tenderness than their masters, were luxuriating in sunny grass."

Etymology

From hand + feed.

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