English

Alternative forms

• stronghanded

Adjective

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

1. Having hands that are strong; by extension, Strong, mighty;
   • 1846, Eliza Wood Farnham, Life in Prairie Land, ISBN 0252060393, page 210:

     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 well-earned repose of ripened years.

   • 1872, Mark Twain, Roughing It:

     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.

   • 2008, Patrick Augustine Sheehan, Miriam Lucas, ISBN 1434475603, page 137:

     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.

2. forceful or vigorous.
   • 1998, Dalai Lama & ‎Robert Kiely, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus, ISBN 0861711386:

     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 flipping through the program while his translator dispatched a lengthy remark.

   • 2006, Tamara Neal, The Wounded Hero: Non-fatal Injury in Homer's Iliad, ISBN 3039108794, page 57:

     Here, their sweat attests to labour, and their weals are caused by strong-handed grips.

   • 2014, Jack A. Langedijk, because: (an inspirational novel), ISBN 0993758606:

     Robert just nodded and then switftly turned the wheelchair with a strong-handed jerk down on one wheel in the opposite direction of Greg.

3. Resolute; unwavering and dauntless.
   • 1856, Washington Irving, Life of George Washington - Volume 1, page 442:

     Resolute, strong-handed fellows they were, with Ethan Allen at their head; a native of Connecticut, but brought up among the Green Mountains.

   • 1875, The Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art:

     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, does;

   • 2010, G.M. Mackenzie, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey-In-Europe, ISBN 1145700748, page 21:

     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 Greek;

4. Firm; strict and harshly enforced.
   • 2013, Marvin Oxenham, Higher Education in Liquid Modernity, ISBN 1135080232:

     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 also a strong-handed political agency to make these models work.

   • 2013, Rasmus Christian Elling, Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity after Khomeini, ISBN 1137142650:

     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.

   • 2015, John Ashdown-Hill, The Mythology of Richard III, ISBN 1445644738, page viii:

     But what this shows is that Richard was not really a strong-handed ruler or a harsh person.

5. (obsolete) Having many workers.
   • 1844, James Fenimore Cooper, Afloat and Ashore: A Sea Tale:

     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.

   • 1845, New Peterson magazine, page 16:

     “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."

   • 1875, Oliver Optic, Oliver Optic's Magazine for Young and Old, Volume 17, page 202:

     I'm downright obliged to you, Harry, and to all the rest of the boys, for comin' to help a cripple like me, for we're not very strong-handed now; the boys are gone, and I'm not much 'count any way.

6. (obsolete, US) Wealthy.
   • 1820, Eneas Mackenzie, An historical, topographical and descriptive view of the United States of America and of Upper and Lower Canada, page 392:

     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.

   • 1821, Rev. William Bingley, Travels in North America, page 62:

     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 Orleans: is a man of plain, business-like sense, though not in possession, nor desirous, of a very cultivated intellect;

   • 2011, Denise Gigante, The Keats Brothers: the life of John and George, ISBN 0674062728, page 235:

     Unlike the English country squire, the strong-handed farmer in America was a self-made man.

7. (psychology) Strongly lateralized.
   • 2009, Michael A. Jawer, The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion, ISBN 1594779759, page 300:

     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.

   • 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:

     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).

   • 2007 March, SD Christman, JD Jasper, V Sontam, & B Cooil, “Individual differences in risk perception versus risk taking: Handedness and interhemispheric interaction”, in Brain and Cognition:

     There was also a marginal interaction between gender and handedness for recreational risk ratings, F(1,128)=3.70, p=D.057, with mixed-handed females assigning equivalent risk ratings (M=3.34) as strong-handed females (M=3.35), while strong-handed males assigned higher risk ratings (M=3.44) than mixed-handed males (M=2.98).

Adverb

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

1. (shooting) With the gun held in hands braced against each other.
   • 2002, Women and Guns- Volume 13, page 25:

     As an example, firing strong-handed from the Weaver stance, we have our left foot forward and the right foot to the rear.

   • 2012, Brian Enos, Practical Shooting, Beyond Fundamentals, ISBN 0985129255:

     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.

   • 2014, Lawrence N. Blum, Force under Pressure, ISBN 1590563360:

     Let's face it, while there is obvious benefit to range shooting, standing at the fifteen-yard line at a barricade shooting three shots strong-handed and three shots weak-handed just does not equate to the elements the officer will experience if he or she is involved in a tactical encounter containing moving multiple suspects and lethal threat.

2. In a strong-handed manner.
   • 1840, James Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder, Or The Inland Sea, page 263:

     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."

   • 1892, Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict, page 135:

     Provided that report is true, when our border neighbors visit Lawrence again they will need to come strong-handed.

   • 1931, Robert Mann Washburn, Productive Dairying, page 168:

     Ample stimulation seems to be furnished, however, by ordinary rapid, strong-handed milking, followed by a moderate amount of drawing down of the teat and stripping out of the udder.