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Heavy-handed   /hˈɛvi-hˈændəd/   Listen
Heavy-handed

adjective
1.
Lacking physical movement skills, especially with the hands.  Synonyms: bumbling, bungling, butterfingered, ham-fisted, ham-handed, handless, left-handed.  "A bungling performance" , "Ham-handed governmental interference" , "Could scarcely empty a scuttle of ashes, so handless was the poor creature"
2.
Unjustly domineering.  Synonym: roughshod.  "A manager who rode roughshod over all opposition"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Heavy-handed" Quotes from Famous Books



... I was shamed. Never have I felt so grotesquely out of proportion with myself as at that moment. My stature seemed to increase from an even six feet to something like twelve, and my bulk became elephantine. She was so slender, so lissom, so weak, and I so gargantuan, so gorilla-like, so heavy-handed! And I had come gaily up to crush her! What a fine figure ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... world says, are not waste of time. But to drink at the stoup of beauty; to lift the leafy coverlet of earth and seek the cradled God (since here, if anywhere, He dwells), this in the world's eye is waste of time. Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... left his office earlier in the afternoon to make up for arriving late in the morning, he counterbalanced these heavy-handed slatings of his friends by extolling his own performance past and present. Being engaged in revising the Chouans for a fresh edition, he was struck by qualities in it that he had hitherto held too lightly. It was all Scott and all Fenimore ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... that only find a place because Vergil had borrowed similar episodes from Homer. But the Thebais is a professedly mythological epic, and Statius commands a light touch and brilliant colours. The reader merely groans when the heavy-handed Silius introduces his wondrously engraven shield,[610] his funeral games,[611] his Amazon,[612] his dismal catalogues,[613] his Nekuia.[614] In the latter episode, he even introduces the Vergilian Sibyl of Cumae; it is a redeeming feature that Scipio does not make a 'personally ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... resources are located in the north, including coal, which is an important export item. Oil was discovered off the southern coast in 1986 with production reaching 70,000 barrels per day in 1991 and expected to increase in the years ahead. Following the end of the war in 1975, heavy-handed government measures undermined efforts at an efficient merger of the agricultural resources of the south and the industrial resources of the north. The economy remains heavily dependent on foreign aid and has received assistance from UN agencies, France, Australia, Sweden, and Communist countries. ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.



Words linked to "Heavy-handed" :   domineering, maladroit



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