handwave

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handwave

Where it comes from

From hand + wave.

noun handwaves · hand-wave

literally The wave of a hand. 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.
A glib statement or explanation that glosses over important details. In this glib handwave by Friedman, the real results are determined independently of money and financing phenomena; given the way monetarists set up the analysis, the rate of growth of money can only affect the behavior of the price level.

verb handwaves · handwaving · handwaved · hand-wave

rhetoric To explain something superficially, skipping over important details, perhaps appealing to intuition instead. Some readers may wish to handwave this restriction away, thinking of #92;tfrac#123;#92;partial#125;#123;#92;partial#92;rho#125; as a differentiable vector field on #92;mathbb#123;R#125;² that behaves badly at the origin; this approach will suffice for the purposes of this book.

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verb explain something superficially

Русский	отмахнуться otmaxnutʹsja

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MLA

"handwave." Wiktionary, via Micwyn, micwyn.com/word/handwave. Accessed 7 Nov. 2026.

APA

handwave. (n.d.). In Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Retrieved November 7, 2026, from https://micwyn.com/word/handwave

Chicago

"handwave." Wiktionary, via Micwyn. Accessed November 7, 2026. https://micwyn.com/word/handwave.

BibTeX

@misc{handwave_2026,
  title = {handwave},
  howpublished = {Wiktionary, via Micwyn},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://micwyn.com/word/handwave},
  urldate = {2026-11-07}
}