Word.ws English Dictionary

dead hand

dead hand noun: a residual undesirable influence from the past.

Noun

dead hand (countable and uncountable, plural dead hands)

  1. A residual undesirable influence from the past.
    • I'll leave the very bad news to the end as it's outside the industry's control. Yes, the dead hand of the Department for Transport (DfT) still rules!2021 July 14, Barry Doe, “Flexi Seasons undermined by complicated calculations”, in RAIL, number 935, page 54
  2. A hand that is dealt but not used during a card game.
  3. A penalty where a player continues to take their turns, but can no longer win or make tile calls for the remainder of the hand.

Proper noun capitalized: Dead Hand

Dead Hand

  1. A weapons system, implemented by the Soviet Union and by the Russian Federation as the successor state thereof, capable of closing a strategic nuclear strike control loop in the absence of normal command and control channels, analogous in concept to a dead man's switch, in anticipation of a decapitation strike.
    • Near-synonyms: doomsday weapon, doomsday device, doomsday bomb
    • Sometimes people glibly speak as if the Dead Hand were a thing of the past, but it is foolhardy to assume so.
  2. Any such system, whether the cardinal instance (the Soviet/Russian one) or another.
    • The talk then turned darkly to the prospects for building a Dead Hand of their own.

Synonyms of dead hand

Forms of dead hand

pluraldead hands

Questions about dead hand

What does dead hand mean?
Dead hand means a residual undesirable influence from the past.
What part of speech is dead hand?
Dead hand can be a noun or a proper noun.
What is the plural of dead hand?
The plural of dead hand is dead hands.

Words near dead hand in the dictionary

  1. dead furrows
  2. dead giveaway
  3. dead giveaways
  4. dead gold
  5. dead ground
  6. dead hand
  7. dead hands
  8. dead hang
  9. dead hangs
  10. Dead head
  11. Dead heads

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead hand (page history and authors); Dead Hand (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “dead hand.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_hand. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.