Word.ws English Dictionary

whitehanded

whitehanded is the alternative form of white-handed.

Meaning of white-handed

Adjective

white-handed

  1. Having hands that are white.
    • As exemplified by the white-handed gibbon, the commonest and best-studied member of the group, they show a remarkable convergence in social behavior to the dusky titi and other monogamous New World primates.2000, Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology, →ISBN
  2. Characterized by delicacy and a pale-skinned beauty.
    • He was one of the miserable little pretty white-handed, curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language, and did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next.1857, Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days
  3. Aristocratic, with connotations of effeminacy and foppishness.
    • If you want to know more particularly how he looked, call to your remembrance some tawny-whiskered, brown-locked, clear-complexioned young Englishman whom you have met with in a foreign town, and been proud of as a fellow-countryman—well-washed, high-bred, white-handed, yet looking as if he could...1859, George Eliot, Adam Bede
  4. From the professional classes; With hands that are not brown from manual labor.
    • Among the successful there were scarcely any of the head-working, white-handed class, but a number of hard-working, frugal men, who, landing without a penny,...1878, David Blair, The History of Australasia, page 470
  5. Benevolent or virtuous.
    • O welcome, pure-ey'd Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!1634, John Milton, Comus

Forms of whitehanded

comparativemore whitehanded
superlativemost whitehanded

Questions about whitehanded

What is whitehanded the alternative form of?
Whitehanded is the alternative form of white-handed.

Words near whitehanded in the dictionary

  1. Whitehair
  2. whitehaired
  3. Whitehairs
  4. Whitehall
  5. Whitehalls
  6. whitehanded
  7. whitehat
  8. whitehats
  9. Whitehaven
  10. Whitehawk
  11. whitehead

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whitehanded (page history and authors); white-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: “whitehanded.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whitehanded. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.