English

Alternative forms

• swifthanded

Adjective

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

1. Characterized by quick, skillful movements of the hands.
   • 1871, George W. Cox, Popular Romances of the Middle Ages, page 250:

     Then as they fought on foot, fast and fiercely with their swords, Tristrem, being sorely wounded in the thigh, grew well-nigh mad with pain, and with one swift-handed heavy stroke cleft Moraunt's helmet to his skull, breaking the sword-point in his brain.

   • 1886, The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Volume 4, page 158:

     Indeed, so swift-handed was Arjuna that the spectators could not perceive any interval between his taking up an arrow, and fixing it on the bow-string, and letting it off by a stretch of the Gāndiva!

   • 1996, Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, ISBN 9004105298, page 76:

     If tiles are needed up on a roof, they are thrown three or four at a time, and caught by a worker standing on the roof. Both the thrower and the catcher must be swift-handed, otherwise the tiles will not remain whole.

2. Quick to respond or react.
   • 1847, William H. Prescott, The History Of The Conquest Of Peru:

     But, in the simple questions submitted to the Peruvian judge, delay would have been useless; and the Spaniards, familiar with the evils growing out of long-protracted suits, where the successful litigant is too often a ruined man, are loud in their encomiums of this swift-handed and economical justice.

   • 1890, The Atlantic Monthly - Volume 66, page 673:

     So, in this country, corruption or maladministration in judicial procedure would be followed by swift-handed retribution

   • 2008, Christian Emden, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of History, ISBN 0521880564, page 319:

     Thanks to the pathological manner in which nationalist nonsense has alienated and continues to alienate the people of Europe from each other; thanks as well to the short-sighted and swift-handed politicians who have risen to the top with the help of this nonsense, and have no idea of the extent to which the politics of dissolution that they practice and only be entr'acte politics, -- thanks to all this and to some sign that are strictly unmentionable today, the most unambiguous signs declaring that Europe wats to be one are either overlooked or willfully and mendaciously reinterpreted