Handwriting
nounWriting produced by hand with a pen or pencil, especially considered as a personal style of forming letters.
How to spell handwriting
11 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce handwriting
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does handwriting mean?
- nounWriting produced by hand with a pen or pencil, especially considered as a personal style of forming letters.
Handwriting in a sentence
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The doctor's handwriting was almost impossible to read on the prescription.
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She practised her handwriting until every letter looked neat and even.
Where does handwriting come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This is a transparent English compound that joins 'hand' with 'writing', both of them native Old English words. 'Hand' descends from the Old English 'hand' for the part of the body, shared across the Germanic languages, while 'writing' comes from the verb 'writan', which originally meant 'to scratch, score, or carve', because the earliest writing was incised into wood or stone. As ink and parchment replaced carving, 'write' settled into its modern sense of forming letters, yet the old 'wr-' spelling survived even after the 'w' fell silent in speech. The compound 'handwriting' was formed in the late medieval period to distinguish script made by the human hand from printed or mechanically produced text. The hidden 'w' in the middle, inherited straight from that ancient carving verb, is the one detail a quick writer can drop.
How the word is built
- hand (the body part used to write)
- writing (verbal noun of write, from Old English writan)
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