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say it: hand
hand is a noun and verb meaning "the (prehensile) extremity of the superior limb". It carries 16 recorded senses.
a hired laborer on a farm or ranch
“the hired hand fixed the railing”
“a ranch hand”
something written by hand
“she recognized his handwriting”
“his hand was illegible”
handwriting
a position given by its location to the side of an object
“objections were voiced on every hand”
the cards held in a card game by a given player at any given time
“I didn't hold a good hand all evening”
“he kept trying to see my hand”
a rotating pointer on the face of a timepiece
“the big hand counts the minutes”
a unit of length equal to 4 inches; used in measuring horses
“the horse stood 20 hands”
a card player in a game of bridge
“we need a 4th hand for bridge”
terminal part of the forelimb in certain vertebrates (e.g. apes or kangaroos)
“the kangaroo's forearms seem undeveloped but the powerful five-fingered hands are skilled at feinting and clouting”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for hand come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.