ready-handed
ready-handed adjective: capable or skillful, especially at manual tasks.
Adjective
ready-handed (comparative more ready-handed, superlative most ready-handed)
- Capable or skillful, especially at manual tasks.
- Abdul Kader, the tailor who had attached himself to me, as a man ready-handed at all things, from mending a pair of pants, making a delicate entremets, or shooting an elephant, but whom the interior proved to be the weakliest of the weakly, unfit for anything except eating and drinking — almost...1871, Henry Morton Stanley, How I Found Livingstone, published 2013, →ISBN
- And ready money had been so much more plentiful of late, owing to poor John Morton's ready-handed honesty!1876 May – 1877 July, Anthony Trollope, “At Last”, in The American Senator […], volume III, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1877, →OCLC, page 170
Adverb
ready-handed (comparative more ready-handed, superlative most ready-handed)
- In readiness, fully prepared.
- Higher education— general, professional, and technical— whether under public or private auspices must be helped to grow both in quantity and quality until it is able to meet full and ready-handed the problem of training the leadership of our democracy.1921, Pennsylvania School Journal, volume 70, page 93
- Each arm well-sinewed, Each heart as a lion's ; Fiercely and wildly, Ready-handed and boldly, On each field be triumphant, Wherever you chance to be, Horo, make ready to go.1984, John Lorne Campbell, Highland songs of the Forty-five, page 13
Forms of ready-handed
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more ready-handed |
| superlative | most ready-handed |
| alternative form | readyhanded |
| Adverb | |
| comparative | more ready-handed |
| superlative | most ready-handed |
Origin of ready-handed
From ready + handed.
Words formed from ready-handed
Questions about ready-handed
- What does ready-handed mean?
- Ready-handed means capable or skillful, especially at manual tasks.
- What part of speech is ready-handed?
- Ready-handed can be an adjective or an adverb.
Words near ready-handed in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: ready-handed (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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