Other forms: hands, handed, handing
Your hand is the part at the end of your arm with five fingers. Hold my hand, raise your hand, wash your hands.
The word does an enormous amount of other work. A hand is help — give me a hand; a worker — a farm hand, all hands on deck; a pointer on a clock — the hour hand; and the cards you are dealt. As a verb it means to pass something: hand it over. The idioms fill pages: on the other hand, out of hand, first hand, hands down, get out of hand, know it like the back of your hand.
1nounhandThe part at the end of the arm, with five fingers.
“She broke her hand and typed with the other one for a month.”
2nounhelpHelp.
“Give me a hand with this and it takes two minutes.”
3verbpassTo pass something to somebody.
“He handed over the keys and did not look back.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
hand is a body part, or help.
Old English hand is Germanic and has no clear relatives outside the family, which is unusual for a body part. Latin manus gave English manual, manage and manufacture, so the language uses two unrelated hand-words side by side without noticing.
Middle English
hond
English, today
hand
From Middle English hond. From Middle English hond, hand, from Old English hand, from Proto-West Germanic handu, from Proto-Germanic handuz. See also Dutch - and Swedish hand (“hand”), Danish hånd, German Hand, West Frisian hân. Perhaps compare Old Swedish hinna (“to gain”), Gothic 𐍆𐍂𐌰𐌷𐌹𐌽𐌸𐌰𐌽 (“to take captive, capture”); and Latvian sīts (“hunting spear”), Ancient Greek κεντέω (“prick”), Albanian çandër (“pitchfork, prop”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA