hand over hand
hand over hand adverb: by passing the hands alternately one before or above the other, especially with rope.
Adverb
hand over hand (not comparable)
- by passing the hands alternately one before or above the other, especially with rope
- Max went up the rigging hand over hand, and brought his red head with a bump against the base of Harry’s back.1849, Herman Melville, “chapter 50”, in Redburn: His First Voyage. […], 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, […], →OCLC
- rapidly
- In this way he made money hand over hand; became a rich and mighty man, and exalted his cocked hat upon change.1824, Washington Irving, The Devil and Tom Walker
- He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped speculating and improving till he'd scraped together three or four hundred thousand dollars1890, William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes, chapter 11
- Synonyms:
- hand over fist
hand over hand meaning in Bengali
hand over hand in Bengali
- দ্রুতগতিতে
Synonyms of hand over hand
Questions about hand over hand
- What does hand over hand mean?
- Hand over hand means by passing the hands alternately one before or above the other, especially with rope.
- What is hand over hand in Bengali?
- Hand over hand in Bengali is দ্রুতগতিতে. See Hand over hand meaning in Bengali.
- What part of speech is hand over hand?
- Hand over hand is an adverb.
Words near hand over hand in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: hand over hand (page history and authors); hand over hand (Bengali Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hand over hand.ogg.
Cite this entry: “hand over hand.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hand_over_hand. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.