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handshake

nounverbattested in dialogue

  • United States//ˈhæn(d)ˌʃeɪk//

The grasping of hands by two people when greeting, leave-taking, or making an agreement.

noun

  1. 1

    The grasping of hands by two people when greeting, leave-taking, or making an agreement.

    Eccles' handshake, eager and practiced and hard, seems to symbolize for him an embrace. For an instant Rabbit fears he will never let go.

  2. 2

    An exchange of signals between two devices when communications begin in order to ensure synchronization.

Etymology

From hand + shake. See the appendix for the history of the gesture itself.

verb

  1. 1

    To perform a handshake; to shake hands.

  2. 2

    To perform a handshake with another device.

Forms

plural
handshakes
past tense
handshaked, handshook
past participle
handshaked, handshook
present participle
handshaking
third person singular
handshakes
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).