Word.ws English Dictionary

handly

handly adjective: synonym of handy.

Adjective

handly (not comparable)

  1. (rare) Synonym of handy.
    • George W. Greene's " Short History of Rhode Island" (1877) is a handly manual but nothing more.1921, Peter George Mode, Source book and bibliographical guide for American church history
    • […] Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris published a handly manual in off-set intitled Bibliography — International Migration of Manpower (1).1971, World justice: Volume 12
    Synonyms:
    handy
  2. (obsolete) Of or pertaining to the hand; manual.
    • The word handly has no asterisk because it is in fact recorded several times in Middle English, and with precisely the meaning 'manual'.[2009, Philip Durkin, The Oxford guide to etymology

Synonyms of handly

Origin of handly

From Middle English handly, handliche; equivalent to hand + -ly. Compare German handlich (“handy, manageable”), Swedish handlig (“handy”).

Questions about handly

What does handly mean?
Handly means synonym of handy.
What part of speech is handly?
Handly is an adjective.

Words near handly in the dictionary

  1. Handlons
  2. handloom
  3. handloomed
  4. handlooming
  5. handlooms
  6. handly
  7. handmade
  8. handmadeness
  9. handmades
  10. handmaid
  11. handmaiden

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: handly (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “handly.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/handly. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.