Word.ws English Dictionary

shovel-handed

shovel-handed adjective: brawny and large, with connotations of being unintelligent, as one who is fit for digging ditches.

Adjective

shovel-handed (comparative more shovel-handed, superlative most shovel-handed)

  1. brawny and large, with connotations of being unintelligent, as one who is fit for digging ditches.
    • I do not wish any mass at all, but honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or lazzaroni at all.1870, Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II, page 449
    • There was his cousin, Sivan, the once shy boy who had grown as bulky as his shovel-handed father and then some more, and had learned to use his body efficiently with the help of the local kick-boxing club.2011, Sophie Hardach, The Registrar's Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, →ISBN

Examples of shovel-handed in a sentence

  • Shovel-handed ape!” The blood-laced eyes of Ruthlen Beauson bagged gibbously behind their horn-rimmed lenses.2011, Richard Matheson, Steel: And Other Stories, →ISBN, page 153:
  • They belonged to the shovel-handed goalkeeper whose size the first time he'd seen him had made him bolt for home, the Ulsterman and Munich survivor Harry Gregg.2011, Gordon Burn, Best and Edwards, →ISBN, page 132:

Forms of shovel-handed

comparativemore shovel-handed
superlativemost shovel-handed

Origin of shovel-handed

From shovel + handed.

Questions about shovel-handed

What does shovel-handed mean?
Shovel-handed means brawny and large, with connotations of being unintelligent, as one who is fit for digging ditches.
How do you use shovel-handed in a sentence?
Shovel-handed ape!” The blood-laced eyes of Ruthlen Beauson bagged gibbously behind their horn-rimmed lenses.
What part of speech is shovel-handed?
Shovel-handed is an adjective.

Words near shovel-handed in the dictionary

  1. shovel ready
  2. shovel test
  3. shovel tests
  4. shovel up
  5. shovel-full
  6. shovel-handed
  7. shovel-nosed
  8. shovel-nosed sturgeon
  9. shovel-ready
  10. shovelable
  11. shovelard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shovel-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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Cite this entry: “shovel-handed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shovel-handed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.