Word.ws English Dictionary

handlesome

handlesome adjective: typified by, or requiring handling; (by extension) difficult to manage.

Adjective

handlesome (comparative more handlesome, superlative most handlesome)

  1. (rare) Typified by, or requiring handling; (by extension) difficult to manage
    • River navigation is a different thing to steering a motor-car on solid dry land. But a thirty horse-power launch, doing thirteen miles an hour, is a handlesome craft, and we soon left behind us.1908, Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News, volume 68, pages 106–107
    • "[…] Tom, you had better hunt the bitch pack,
      Dog hounds is none so handlesome […]1937, Patrick Reginald Chalmers, The horn: a lay of the Grassington fox-hounds, page 50

Forms of handlesome

comparativemore handlesome
superlativemost handlesome

Origin of handlesome

From handle + -some.

Questions about handlesome

What does handlesome mean?
Handlesome means typified by, or requiring handling; (by extension) difficult to manage.
What part of speech is handlesome?
Handlesome is an adjective.

Words near handlesome in the dictionary

  1. handles oneself
  2. handles up
  3. handles with kid gloves
  4. handles without gloves
  5. handles without mittens
  6. handlesome
  7. handless
  8. handlessness
  9. handlest
  10. handleth
  11. handlever

Source and license

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