Word.ws English Dictionary

secretary hand

secretary hand noun: a style of handwriting developed in Europe and used during the 16th and 17th centuries for writing English, German, Welsh and Gaelic; a variety of this style.

secretary hand: a style of handwriting developed in Europe and used during the 16th and 17th centuries for writing...
Image: William Shakespeare and unknown scribe, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

secretary hand (countable and uncountable, plural secretary hands)

  1. (historical) A style of handwriting developed in Europe and used during the 16th and 17th centuries for writing English, German, Welsh and Gaelic; a variety of this style.
    • It is written in three different Secretary hands: the first finishing at stanza 9 but with stanzas unnumbered,[…].1961, Bernard Mellor, The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert, page 280
    • When Mercy Harvey advised the nobleman to imitate her handwriting, she specified that he should write the address on the outside of the letter in "a small raggid secretary hand."1998, Eve Rachele Sanders, Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England, page 173

Examples of secretary hand in a sentence

  • There are five scribes, all using variations on Secretary hands consistent with the third quarter of the fifteenth century.2004, “Introduction”, in Stephen H. A. Shepherd, editor, Turpines Story, page xvi:
  • While originating at the end of the medieval period, the secretary hand was not widely employed until the early modern period, by which time it had completely displaced the earlier court hands.2004, “Introduction”, in Helen Ostovich, Elizabeth Sauer, editors, Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and...

Forms of secretary hand

pluralsecretary hands
alternative formSecretary hand

Questions about secretary hand

What does secretary hand mean?
Secretary hand means a style of handwriting developed in Europe and used during the 16th and 17th centuries for writing English, German, Welsh and Gaelic; a variety of this style.
How do you use secretary hand in a sentence?
There are five scribes, all using variations on Secretary hands consistent with the third quarter of the fifteenth century.
What part of speech is secretary hand?
Secretary hand is a noun.
What is the plural of secretary hand?
The plural of secretary hand is secretary hands.

Words near secretary hand in the dictionary

  1. secretary bird
  2. secretary birds
  3. secretary desk
  4. secretary desks
  5. secretary general
  6. secretary hand
  7. secretary hands
  8. secretary of state
  9. secretary problem
  10. secretary problems
  11. secretary spread

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: secretary hand (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:

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