Wide-handed

adj, adv

adj, adv ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Adjective
  1. 1
    Having hands that are wide.

    "The two masters have fundamentally different ideals of the human form : Fra Filippo's figures are short and thick, round-headed, and wide-handed ; Botticelli's, on the contrary, are tall and slender, with long oval faces and narrow bony hands"

  2. 2
    Characterized by hands held open and splayed fingers.

    "It was a strange kind of clapping; a sort of wide-handed upward clap, compounded by the exaggerated nasal voice the hijras used in speech."

  3. 3
    Characterized by hands held away from the torso.

    "I like doing 100 by doing 40 normal, 30 wide-handed position, and then 30 in the close-handed position."

  4. 4
    Generous

    "His songwriting success brought Yvain to the notice of wide-handed theatre magnate Gustave Quinson, who had produced Henri Christin6's Phi-Phi three years earlier and, in spite of the fact that the composer had not a full score to his name, Quinson signed him up to write three musicals."

Adverb
  1. 1
    In a wide-handed manner.

    "Not such are the beings that earth now breeds : No more the vast god nor the demon : her seeds Wide-handed she scatters, wide-handed feeds"

Example

More examples

"The two masters have fundamentally different ideals of the human form : Fra Filippo's figures are short and thick, round-headed, and wide-handed ; Botticelli's, on the contrary, are tall and slender, with long oval faces and narrow bony hands"

Etymology

From wide + handed.

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