strong-handed
strong-handed adjective: having hands that are strong; by extension, Strong, mighty.
Adjective
strong-handed (comparative more strong-handed, superlative most strong-handed)
- Having hands that are strong; by extension, Strong, mighty
- The paths were kept clean; the bits of board before the door were well swept, the children looked tidy, and the old grandmother, of whose fat, happy face, and clean-starched cap, I have yet a faint vision, seemed the belle ideal of a bold-hearted, strong-handed western woman, sinking into the...1846, Eliza Wood Farnham, Life in Prairie Land, →ISBN, page 210
- No women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans,—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants—the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.1872, Mark Twain, Roughing It
- Forceful or vigorous.
- He not only punctuated his remarks with strong-handed gestures, coy smiles, dancing eyebrows, and guffaws, he seemed constantly to be folding or flinging about the loose ends of his maroon habit, seizing the limbs of panelists sitting on stage with him, waving to friends in the audience, and...1998, Dalai Lama, Robert Kiely, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, →ISBN
- Here, their sweat attests to labour, and their weals are caused by strong-handed grips.2006, Tamara Neal, The Wounded Hero: Non-fatal Injury in Homer's Iliad, →ISBN, page 57
- Resolute; unwavering and dauntless.
- Resolute, strong-handed fellows they were, with Ethan Allen at their head; a native of Connecticut, but brought up among the Green Mountains.1856, Washington Irving, Life of George Washington - Volume 1, page 442
- An unfathomably cunning kind of fellow, as well as an audacious and strong-handed! ... Harald flies to Lymfjord with his ships, challenges King Harald Greyfell to land and fight; which the undaunted Greyfell, though so far outnumbered, does1875, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art
- Firm; strict and harshly enforced.
- The justification for this was that individual human beings were either fragile, fearful and slaves to themselves, or beastish and prone to the war of all against all (Bauman 2000: 20), which meant that humanity needed expert social architects to provide the perfect models of the common life and...2013, Marvin Oxenham, Higher Education in Liquid Modernity, →ISBN
- With Khomeini's death, however, Iran also lost a strong-handed arbitrator, and factional rivalries behind the curtains soon spilled over into the public arena.2013, Rasmus Christian Elling, Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity after Khomeini, →ISBN
- Having many workers.
- He took us on board purely out of a national feeling, for his ship was strong-handed without us, having thirty-two souls, all told, when he received us five.1844, James Fenimore Cooper, Afloat and Ashore: A Sea Tale
- “We have rather too few men just now,” said : Well—that very day—there was a fine : Smith, “but there being no enemy on the coast, we let most of the troops go home for a few days; but by day after to-morrow we shall be strong-handed enough for a whole man-of-war's crew."1845, New Peterson magazine, page 16
- Wealthy.
- If he be strong-handed, (has property,) he has the trees felled, about one foot from the earth, dragged into heaps, and made into an immense bonfire.1820, Eneas Mackenzie, An historical, topographical and descriptive view of the United States of America and of Upper and Lower Canada, page 392
- Third, the wealthy, or “strong-handed” farmer, who owns from five to twelve hundred acres, has from one-fourth to one-third under cultivation, of a kind much superior to the former; raises live stock for the home, and Atlantic city markets; sends beef, pork, cheese, lard, and butter, to New...1821, Rev. William Bingley, Travels in North America, page 62
- Strongly lateralized.
- Interestingly, the study of hadedness and brain laterality is moving toward an approach where individuals are evaluated according to the degree they are “strong-handed” or “mixed-handed” rather than being assigned to the fixed categories left-handed, right-handed, or ambidextrous.2009, Michael A. Jawer, The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, →ISBN, page 300
- The fact that the correlations were stronger for the absolute than for the raw EHI scores indicates that handedness may best be thought of as ranging from perfectly mixed-handed (ie, an EHI score of 0) to perfectly strong-handed (ie, an EHI score of +/-100).2005 July, RE Propper, SD Christman, KA Phaneuf, “A mixed-handed advantage in episodic memory: A possible role of interhemispheric interaction”, in Memory & Cognition, volume 33, number 4
Adverb
strong-handed (comparative more strong-handed, superlative most strong-handed)
- With the gun held in hands braced against each other.
- As an example, firing strong-handed from the Weaver stance, we have our left foot forward and the right foot to the rear.2002, Women and Guns- Volume 13, page 25
- And if the targets require you to make really awkward leans from your freestyle position, don't ever rule out the possibility of engaging the targets strong-handed or even possibly weak-handed.2012, Brian Enos, Practical Shooting, Beyond Fundamentals, →ISBN
- In a strong-handed manner.
- Six men and two women would make but a poor job, in defending such a place as this, should the enemy invade us, as no doubt, Frenchman-like, they would take very good care to come strong-handed."1840, James Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder, Or The Inland Sea, page 263
- Provided that report is true, when our border neighbors visit Lawrence again they will need to come strong-handed.1892, Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict, page 135
Examples of strong-handed in a sentence
- One was evidently a mechanic — a great burly, red-faced, strong-handed man, with some tokens of the smoke and smut of his calling hidden away in creases on his neck and face and hands.2008, Patrick Augustine Sheehan, Miriam Lucas, →ISBN, page 137:
- Robert just nodded and then switftly turned the wheelchair with a strong-handed jerk down on one wheel in the opposite direction of Greg.2014, Jack A. Langedijk, because: (an inspirational novel), →ISBN:
- Wisely applied, here was a means by which the resolute and strong-handed Serbian might have become content to find his spokesman in the. eloquent and ingenious Greek2010, G.M. Mackenzie, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-In-Europe, →ISBN, page 21:
- But what this shows is that Richard was not really a strong-handed ruler or a harsh person.2015, John Ashdown-Hill, The Mythology of Richard III, →ISBN, page viii:
Forms of strong-handed
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more strong-handed |
| superlative | most strong-handed |
| alternative form | stronghanded |
| Adverb | |
| comparative | more strong-handed |
| superlative | most strong-handed |
Origin of strong-handed
* strong + handed
Words formed from strong-handed
Questions about strong-handed
- What does strong-handed mean?
- Strong-handed means having hands that are strong; by extension, Strong, mighty.
- How do you use strong-handed in a sentence?
- One was evidently a mechanic — a great burly, red-faced, strong-handed man, with some tokens of the smoke and smut of his calling hidden away in creases on his neck and face and hands.
- What part of speech is strong-handed?
- Strong-handed can be an adjective or an adverb.
Words near strong-handed in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: strong-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.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “strong-handed.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/strong-handed. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.