Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Work done by hand rather than by machine.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. Work done by hand, as distinguished from that done by machinery. In decorative art hand-work is much esteemed as having variety and life: it may include the use of all tools and appliances which are not merely mechanical in their action. Thus, a punch producing an impressed flower may be used many times in the same design, which still remains hand-work; but the use of a single punch producing the whole design at a blow is not so termed. The engraving of the punch itself may, however, have been handwork of a high quality.
Wiktionary
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. work done with the hands, as distinguished from work done by a machine; handiwork.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a work produced by hand labor
Etymologies
- hand + work (Wiktionary)
Examples
“So you feel "Look at how wonderful the eye is, surely it proclaims God's handwork" is reasonable, but "Look at how shoddy the panda's thumb is, surely it denies God's handwork" is objectionable.”
“It would seem to me that handwork is handwork, whether spent truing an action and lapping a barrel or carving and finishing a stock.”
“I think the peacefulness of the handwork is just what I need right now ...”
“The second kind of labour which every owner of a farm had to do on the monks 'land was called handwork, that is to say, he had to help repair buildings, or cut down trees, or gather fruit, or make ale, or carry loads -- anything, in fact, which wanted doing and which the steward told him to do.”
“In ancient Greece, where a single word, techne, described every kind of handwork from painting to weaving to blacksmithing, a goddess, Athena, ran the show, except for the smithy where the gods ordered up their armor (and perhaps the shoes for Pegasus and Apollo's horses of the sun): that dark, dirty realm belonged to lame Hephaistos.”
“About one-half the amount paid for labor goes to the men who run the machine tools, and the other half is paid to workmen who do the other work, such as handwork, assembling, transporting, etc.”
“_Stem Stitch_ is used in frame embroidery, and does not differ in any way from that described at page 20, under "handwork," except that the needle is of course worked through the material with both hands, as is the case in all frame work.”
“Blurring the Line: art of thread, Bjarnadottir adopts the "handwork" of her native Iceland as she "unravels its traditions within the context of contemporary art.”
“Everywhere there were people –- men working in the ankle-deep mud of the irrigated fields; a group of women sitting in a circle on a huge cloth, doing some kind of handwork I couldn’t quite see; children chasing each other down the long narrow mounds that divided the rectangular plots, or shooing cows from one meager pasture to another with long switches.”
“You also have to mill and tap the receiver, which requires extensive handwork.”
The Volokh Conspiracy » President Calderon’s claim about “assault weapons”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘handwork’.
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Brochettes of Random Palavery
Another of my random palavery lists for words or phrases that haven't yet found a place in one or more of my other lists.
nonexclusivity, adaptationist, paxillin, adduct, unblushingly cribbed, ptomaïne, microsievert, millisievert, too big to jail, tastemaker, tinsmithing, Nimzo-Indian and 1616 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for handwork.
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