"handwave" meaning in All languages combined

See handwave on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Forms: handwaves [plural]
Etymology: hand + wave Etymology templates: {{compound|en|hand|wave}} hand + wave Head templates: {{en-noun}} handwave (plural handwaves)
  1. (literally) The wave of a hand. Tags: literally
    Sense id: en-handwave-en-noun-Y2vGifxG
  2. A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details.
    Sense id: en-handwave-en-noun-FqIxvmwc Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English links with manual fragments Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 1 60 39 Disambiguation of English links with manual fragments: 3 47 50
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: hand-wave

Verb [English]

Forms: handwaves [present, singular, third-person], handwaving [participle, present], handwaved [participle, past], handwaved [past]
Etymology: hand + wave Etymology templates: {{compound|en|hand|wave}} hand + wave Head templates: {{en-verb}} handwave (third-person singular simple present handwaves, present participle handwaving, simple past and past participle handwaved)
  1. (rhetoric, academia) To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead. Tags: rhetoric Categories (topical): Rhetoric Related terms: hand waving, handwaving, handwavium, handwavy, wave of the hand, fudge [verb], the rest is history Translations (explain something superficially): отмахнуться (otmaxnutʹsja) (note: somewhat) (Russian)
    Sense id: en-handwave-en-verb-HcfPwpFT Categories (other): English links with manual fragments Disambiguation of English links with manual fragments: 3 47 50 Topics: academia, scholarly, sciences
The following are not (yet) sense-disambiguated
Synonyms: hand-wave

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for handwave meaning in All languages combined (4.6kB)

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        {
          "ref": "1871, Archibald Forbes, My Experiences of the War Between France and Germany, facsimile edition, volume II, Adamant Media Corporation, published 2005, page 354",
          "text": "The leader, an upright, broad-shouldered old man, with snow-white hair, half halts his horse with a handwave of salutation, as he reaches the Imperial Crown Prince, then gallops on with the latter hanging close on his flank.",
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          "ref": "1991, Robert Barnard, A Scandal in Belgravia, page 213",
          "roman": "\"Papparazzi.\"",
          "text": "\"[…]In fact I tell this mob\"— he gave a derogatory handwave in the direction of the ten or twelve pairs of eyes that were still intent on us—\"that I was the original of these Pappa-whatsits.\"",
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          "ref": "2001, Stephanie Frank Singer, Symmetry in Mechanics: A Gentle, Modern Introduction, page 33",
          "text": "Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #x5C;tfrac#x7B;#x5C;partial#x7D;#x7B;#x5C;partial#x5C;rho#x7D; as a differentiable vector field on #x5C;mathbb#x7B;R#x7D;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.",
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          "word": "handwaving"
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          "word": "handwavy"
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          "word": "wave of the hand"
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          "code": "ru",
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          "note": "somewhat",
          "roman": "otmaxnutʹsja",
          "sense": "explain something superficially",
          "word": "отмахнуться"
        }
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          "text": "Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #x5C;tfrac#x7B;#x5C;partial#x7D;#x7B;#x5C;partial#x5C;rho#x7D; as a differentiable vector field on #x5C;mathbb#x7B;R#x7D;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.",
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      "code": "ru",
      "lang": "Russian",
      "note": "somewhat",
      "roman": "otmaxnutʹsja",
      "sense": "explain something superficially",
      "word": "отмахнуться"
    }
  ],
  "word": "handwave"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-03 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.