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)
- 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
Forms of hand-wave
| third-person singular present | hand-waves |
|---|---|
| present participle | hand-waving |
| past participle | hand-waved |
| past | hand-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
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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “hand-wave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hand-wave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.
