Handwave
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 The wave of a hand. literally
"The leader, an upright, broad-shouldered old man, with snow-white hair, half halts his horse with a handwave of salutation, as he reaches the Imperial Crown Prince, then gallops on with the latter hanging close on his flank."
- 2 A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details.
"In this glib handwave by Friedman, the real results are determined independently of money and financing phenomena; given the way monetarists set up the analysis, the rate of growth of money can only affect the behavior of the price level."
- 1 To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead. rhetoric
"Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #92;tfrac#123;#92;partial#125;#123;#92;partial#92;rho#125; as a differentiable vector field on #92;mathbb#123;R#125;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book."
Synonyms
All synonymsExample
More examples"The leader, an upright, broad-shouldered old man, with snow-white hair, half halts his horse with a handwave of salutation, as he reaches the Imperial Crown Prince, then gallops on with the latter hanging close on his flank."
Etymology
From hand + wave.
Related phrases
More for "handwave"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.