Word.ws English Dictionary

handfight

handfight verb: to fight using hands.

Verb

handfight (third-person singular simple present handfights, present participle handfighting, simple past and past participle handfought)

  1. To fight using hands.
    • The big blond handfought the blockers, drifted with the interference, forced the play wide.1949, Caary Paul Jackson, Rose Bowl All-American, New York, N.Y.: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, page 78
    • The general impression left by his account was of a handfought, skilfully contrived victory.1972, Louis Green, Chronicle into History: An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History), Cambridge University...

Examples of handfight in a sentence

  • He lay still; whatever Arigh’s handfighting technique was, it worked well.1987, Harry Turtledove, An Emperor for the Legion (The Videssos Cycle; 2), Del Rey Books, →ISBN, page 229:
  • Now maybe you think handfighting a couple of punks in an alley’s okay, or shooting them down like you did Fineagh Steel awhile back, but we’ve all got to play the cards we’re dealt.2010, Charles de Lint, “Berlin”, in Jonathan Strahan, Marianne S. Jablon, editors, Wings of Fire, Night Shade Books, →ISBN, page 384:

Forms of handfight

third-person singular presenthandfights
present participlehandfighting
past participlehandfought
pasthandfought

Origin of handfight

From hand + fight.

Questions about handfight

What does handfight mean?
Handfight means to fight using hands.
How do you use handfight in a sentence?
He lay still; whatever Arigh’s handfighting technique was, it worked well.
What part of speech is handfight?
Handfight is a verb.
What is the past tense of handfight?
The past tense of handfight is handfought.

Words near handfight in the dictionary

  1. handfed
  2. handfeed
  3. handfeeding
  4. handfeeds
  5. handfeel
  6. handfight
  7. handfighting
  8. handfights
  9. handfish
  10. handfishes
  11. handflag

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: handfight (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: “handfight.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/handfight. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.