Word.ws English Dictionary

hanky-twisting

hanky-twisting is the present participle and gerund of hanky-twist.

Meaning of hanky-twist

Verb

hanky-twist (third-person singular simple present hanky-twists, present participle hanky-twisting, simple past and past participle hanky-twisted)

  1. To fret; to worry ineffectually.
    • There must in other fields be analogous forms of the brow-knitting and hanky-twisting which have accompanied the more narcissistic aspects of the 'literary turn' in anthropology (of which Writing Culture is least typical) and cognate fields.1993, Stephen L. Nugent, Amazonian Caboclo Society: An Essay on Invisibility and Peasant Economy

Questions about hanky-twisting

What is hanky-twisting the present participle and gerund of?
Hanky-twisting is the present participle and gerund of hanky-twist.

Words near hanky-twisting in the dictionary

  1. hanky-panking
  2. hanky-panks
  3. hanky-panky
  4. hanky-twist
  5. hanky-twisted
  6. hanky-twisting
  7. hanky-twists
  8. Hanley
  9. Hanley Castle
  10. Hanley Hills
  11. Hanleys

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hanky-twisting (page history and authors); hanky-twist (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: “hanky-twisting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hanky-twisting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.