Word.ws English Dictionary

lift one's hand against

lift one's hand against verb: to assault physically.

Verb

lift one's hand against (third-person singular simple present lifts one's hand against, present participle lifting one's hand against, simple past and past participle lifted one's hand against)

  1. (idiomatic) To assault physically.
    • […] if David refus’d to lift his hand against the Lords anointed, the matter between them was not tyranny, but private enmity, and David as a private person had bin his own revenger, not so much the peoples;1649, John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, page 21
    • […] an Officer of the Guards, on whom I was a little jocose, gave me a Box on the Ear, bidding me make free with my Equals. This very Fellow had been my Butt for many Years, without daring to lift his Hand against me.1743, Henry Fielding, chapter 18, in A Journey from This World to the Next, page 150

Forms of lift one's hand against

third-person singular presentlifts one's hand against
present participlelifting one's hand against
past participlelifted one's hand against
pastlifted one's hand against
alternative formlift hand against
alternative formlift a hand against

Questions about lift one's hand against

What does lift one's hand against mean?
Lift one's hand against means to assault physically.
What part of speech is lift one's hand against?
Lift one's hand against is a verb.
What is the past tense of lift one's hand against?
The past tense of lift one's hand against is lifted one's hand against.

Words near lift one's hand against in the dictionary

  1. lift music
  2. lift net
  3. lift nets
  4. lift off
  5. lift one's game
  6. lift one's hand against
  7. lift oneself up by one's boot-tags
  8. lift oneself up by one's bootstraps
  9. lift oneself up by one's own boot-tags
  10. lift oneself up by one's own bootstraps
  11. lift oneself up by one's own waistbands

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: lift one's hand against (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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