Word.ws English Dictionary

dead hands

dead hands is the plural of dead hand.

Meaning of dead hand

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.

See all 5 meanings of dead hand

Questions about dead hands

What is dead hands the plural of?
Dead hands is the plural of dead hand.

Words near dead hands in the dictionary

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

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dead hands (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 hands.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dead_hands. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.