hamfist

hamfist verb: to handle crudely.

Verb

hamfist (third-person singular simple present hamfists, present participle hamfisting, simple past and past participle hamfisted)

(colloquial) To handle crudely.
- We had an open race and clocks were being read in the clubroom and I had the dubious pleasure of opening the clocks and taking out the ribbons, reckon I’d never make a clock ‘fixer’ the way I was hamfisting through the job, the old Toulets and Benzings were OK but it happened!!1972, “Scottish Racing Section”, in Britain’s Year Book of Pigeon Racing, Weybridge, Surrey: Pigeon Racing News & Gazette, →OCLC, page 227
- Heyoka, dressed in outlandish masks, or sporting phallic false noses, proceeded to impede and obstruct the cooking, neglecting to singe off the dog’s hair, hamfisting the butchering.2006 November 15, Kingsley M. Bray, “Crying for a Vision”, in Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life (The Civilization of the American Indian Series; 254), Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, →ISBN...

But don’t sort of hamfist [it] by putting the two and trying to fudge it.2022 October 7, India McTaggart, quoting Gregory Edmund, “Vale, Carolus: Latin name for King Charles dropped from new coins”, in Chris...
Sometimes you forget to turn one of these whole modes off and it might get you into a bigger problem than if you were hamfisting it around yourself.1968, W. J. P. Knight, “X-15 Performance and Piloting Tasks”, in The Aeronautical Journal, volume 72, London: Royal Aeronautical Society...
The position of the culprit nut would probably have been aggravated by using control augmentation or “hamfisting” the stick.1981 March, Bruce P. Eaton, “Expect the unexpected”, in Dale E. Smith, editor, Approach: The Naval Aviation Safety Review, volume 26...
I tried to abuse it—by botching an imaginary base-to-final turn or by hamfisting a steep turn—but I could not goad it into biting; that’s probably a good trait in a pilot’s first aerobatic airplane.1981 May, Nigel Moll, “Over Easy: Straighten out and fly right is the wrong advice for the pilot learning aerobatics”, in Richard...

Verb
third-person singular present	hamfists
present participle	hamfisting
past participle	hamfisted
past	hamfisted
Noun
plural	hamfists

From ham + fist.

What does hamfist mean?: Hamfist means to handle crudely.
How do you use hamfist in a sentence?: But don’t sort of hamfist [it] by putting the two and trying to fudge it.
What part of speech is hamfist?: Hamfist is a verb.
What is the past tense of hamfist?: The past tense of hamfist is hamfisted.

Adapted from Wiktionary: hamfist (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.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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