shake hands

1. 1.

   take someone's hands and shake them as a gesture of greeting or congratulation

   Broadergreet

Questions about shake hands

What does shake hands mean?

shake hands means "take someone's hands and shake them as a gesture of greeting or congratulation".

Is shake hands a common word?

shake hands is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.