Word.ws English Dictionary

hand-wave

hand-wave is the alternative form of handwave.

Meaning of handwave

Verb

handwave (third-person singular simple present handwaves, present participle handwaving, simple past and past participle handwaved)

  1. (rhetoric) To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.
    • 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.2001, Stephanie Frank Singer, Symmetry in Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction, page 33

See all 3 meanings of handwave

Forms of hand-wave

third-person singular presenthand-waves
present participlehand-waving
past participlehand-waved
pasthand-waved

Questions about hand-wave

What is hand-wave the alternative form of?
Hand-wave is the alternative form of handwave.

Words near hand-wave in the dictionary

  1. hand-wash
  2. hand-washable
  3. hand-washed
  4. hand-washes
  5. hand-washing
  6. hand-wave
  7. hand-waved
  8. hand-waves
  9. hand-waving
  10. hand-wavy
  11. hand-winged

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hand-wave (page history and authors); handwave (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: “hand-wave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hand-wave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.