Word.ws English Dictionary

on hand

on hand prepositional phrase: available; ready; in stock.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Available; ready; in stock.
    • If you have cornstarch on hand, use it; otherwise, try a little flour.
    • Freight rolling stock distribution is the concern of a section in the office. The clerk in charge of this section receives bulk returns from the districts at regular intervals of wagons on hand and wagon requirements.1950 February, “Crewe Divisional Control Room”, in Railway Magazine, page 115
    Synonyms:
    at hand, handy, to hand

on hand meaning in Urdu and Kannada

on hand in Urdu

فرض, موجودہ, تیار, زیراختیار, درپیش

on hand in Kannada

ಕೈಯಲ್ಲಿ

Examples of on hand in a sentence

  • Rustu failed to collect a Whitehead corner, Shawcross saw his effort blocked and Crouch was on hand to bundle over the line from three yards out.2011 September 29, Tom Rostance, “Stoke 2 - 1 Besiktas”, in BBC Sport:
  • She was on hand again in March when the EU gave €7.4bn (£6.3bn) to Egypt’s abusive dictator, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, partly to curb migrant flows.2024 May 4, Simon Tisdall, “Giorgia Meloni and Ursula von der Leyen, the double act that is steering the EU ever rightwards”, in The...

Synonyms of on hand

Forms of on hand

alternative formon-hand
alternative formonhand

Origin of on hand

From Middle English *onhande, onhende, from Old English onhende (“on hand, demanding attention”), from Proto-Germanic *anahandijaz. Equivalent to on- + hand. Cognate with Icelandic áhendur (“within reach”). Compare offhand.

Questions about on hand

What does on hand mean?
On hand means available; ready; in stock.
What is on hand in Urdu?
On hand in Urdu is فرض, موجودہ, تیار. See On hand meaning in Urdu.
How do you use on hand in a sentence?
Rustu failed to collect a Whitehead corner, Shawcross saw his effort blocked and Crouch was on hand to bundle over the line from three yards out.
What part of speech is on hand?
On hand is a prepositional phrase.

Words near on hand in the dictionary

  1. on G
  2. on God
  3. on God's green Earth
  4. on good terms
  5. on guard
  6. on hand
  7. on heat
  8. on high
  9. on hire
  10. On HMS
  11. on hold

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: on hand (page history and authors); on hand (Urdu Wiktionary) (page history and authors); on hand (Kannada Wiktionary) (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:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-on hand.ogg.

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