handwave
handwave noun: the wave of a hand.
Noun
handwave (plural handwaves)
- The wave of a hand.
- The leader, an upright, broad-shouldered old man, with snow-white hair, half halts his horse with a handwave of salutation, as he reaches the Imperial Crown Prince, then gallops on with the latter hanging close on his flank.1871, Archibald Forbes, My Experiences of the War Between France and Germany, facsimile edition, volume II, Adamant Media Corporation, published 2005, page 354
- "[…]In fact I tell this mob"— he gave a derogatory handwave in the direction of the ten or twelve pairs of eyes that were still intent on us—"that I was the original of these Pappa-whatsits."
"Papparazzi."1991, Robert Barnard, A Scandal in Belgravia, page 213
- A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details.
- In this glib handwave by Friedman, the real results are determined independently of money and financing phenomena; given the way monetarists set up the analysis, the rate of growth of money can only affect the behavior of the price level.2008, Hyman P. Minsky, Stabilizing an Unstable Economy, page 285
Verb
handwave (third-person singular simple present handwaves, present participle handwaving, simple past and past participle handwaved)
- To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead.
- Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #92;tfrac#123;#92;partial#125;#123;#92;partial#92;rho#125; as a differentiable vector field on #92;mathbb#123;R#125;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.2001, Stephanie Frank Singer, Symmetry in Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction, page 33
Forms of handwave
| Noun | |
|---|---|
| plural | handwaves |
| alternative form | hand-wave |
| Verb | |
| third-person singular present | handwaves |
| present participle | handwaving |
| past participle | handwaved |
| past | handwaved |
Origin of handwave
From hand + wave.
Questions about handwave
- What does handwave mean?
- Handwave means the wave of a hand.
- What part of speech is handwave?
- Handwave can be a noun or a verb.
- What is the plural of handwave?
- The plural of handwave is handwaves.
Words near handwave in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: handwave (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: “handwave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/handwave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.