Word.ws English Dictionary

hand brake

hand brake is the alternative spelling of handbrake.

Meaning of handbrake

Noun

handbrake (plural handbrakes)

  1. A brake in a vehicle, set by hand, and usually locking on until released by hand, enabling its use when parked.
    • On arrival at Spiez, the locomotive (No. 206) was immediately uncoupled and drew ahead to enable an Italian through coach from Interlaken to Milan to be loose shunted (with passengers aboard and controlled by means of its handbrake) on to the front of the train.1953 August, J. G. Click, “The Lötschberg Railway”, in Railway Magazine, page 515
  2. The mechanism, particularly the locking hand-operated lever or foot-operated toggle lever in a motorcar or the hand-operated crank on a railcar, which is used to set and release such a brake.

See all 3 meanings of handbrake

Forms of hand brake

pluralhand brakes

Questions about hand brake

What is hand brake the alternative spelling of?
Hand brake is the alternative spelling of handbrake.

Words near hand brake in the dictionary

  1. hand bikes
  2. hand bill
  3. hand bills
  4. hand boiler
  5. hand boilers
  6. hand brake
  7. hand brakes
  8. hand breathing
  9. hand bridge
  10. hand bridges
  11. hand cannon

Source and license

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