ham-handed
"ham-handed" is a 9-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“ham-handed” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as an adjective. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 10
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Clumsy, heavy, or inept; not delicate, light or gentle.
Corpus desk
Index EN-ham-handed · ham-handed · English
ham-handed · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 10 letters
- VOW-3 3 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "H" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | ham-handed |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adjective |
| Letters | 10 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “ham-handed” in English
Rare enough to double-check
ham-handed is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anadjective. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. Gloss: "Clumsy, heavy, or inept; not delicate, light or gentle.".
No generated misspelling entries exist for ham-handed in our index, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. No confusable counterpart is on file for this word, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
This entry carries no recorded etymology, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is ham-handed, spelled H-A-M---H-A-N-D-E-D.
Definition
- 1Clumsy, heavy, or inept; not delicate, light or gentle.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how ham-handed appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Some of the dishes arrived damaged after their ham-handed moving efforts.
The result, disappointingly, is a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.