Word.ws English Dictionary

handholdless

handholdless adjective: usually of a man: having never held hands with a member of the opposite sex.

Adjective

handholdless (not comparable)

  1. (Internet, 4chan slang) Usually of a man: having never held hands with a member of the opposite sex.
    • We meet James, a "kissless, hugless, handholdless virgin" (or KHHV in incel parlance) from County Down, Northern Ireland, who says he's an incel because his insecurities, anxiety, mental health problems and troubled upbringing stood in the way of his ability to form relationships with women.2019 July 14, Natalie Gil, “Inside The Secret World Of Incels – The Men Who Want To Punish Women”, in Refinery29, archived from the original on 20 Jul 2019
  2. (literally, rare) Lacking a handhold ("a projection that one may hold onto for support").
    • One false move and I'm down the slope on a mudslide, a gangly pebble in a debris flow, over a short, straight, handholdless twenty-foot drop into the flood, and whisked away into nothingness.2007, Greer K. Chesher, Zion Canyon: A Storied Land, Tucson, A.Z.: University of Arizona Press, →ISBN, page 37

Origin of handholdless

From handhold + -less.

Words formed from handholdless

Questions about handholdless

What does handholdless mean?
Handholdless means usually of a man: having never held hands with a member of the opposite sex.
What part of speech is handholdless?
Handholdless is an adjective.

Words near handholdless in the dictionary

  1. handholdable
  2. handholder
  3. handholders
  4. handholding
  5. handholdings
  6. handholdless
  7. handholds
  8. handholdy
  9. handhole
  10. handholes
  11. handi

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: handholdless (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-handholdless.wav.

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