Handsbreadth
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 a small distance
"The provinces of Holland and Zealand were stanch and true, but the inequality of the contest between a few brave men, upon that handsbreadth of territory, and the powerful Spanish Empire, seemed to render the issue hopeless."
- 2 any unit of length based on the breadth of the human hand wordnet
Example
More examples"The provinces of Holland and Zealand were stanch and true, but the inequality of the contest between a few brave men, upon that handsbreadth of territory, and the powerful Spanish Empire, seemed to render the issue hopeless."
Etymology
From hand + -s- + breadth.
More for "handsbreadth"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.