Other forms: handcuffs, handcuffed, handcuffing
A handcuff is a locking metal ring put round a prisoner's wrist. Two of them joined by a chain or a hinge.
The word is nearly always plural, and the verb means to put them on, so a suspect is handcuffed. Police use them for safety rather than punishment, and the phrase in handcuffs is what makes a news photograph. The figurative sense is about restriction, since being handcuffed by regulations means unable to act. Golden handcuffs is the name for a financial arrangement that makes leaving a job too expensive.
Old English had handcops for shackles, from hand plus cosp, a fetter. The modern word looks instead like hand plus cuff, and the centuries of silence between the two make it hard to say whether one became the other.
Old English
handcops
Middle English
handcops — shackles for the hand, handcuffs
English, today
handcuff
Built from
From hand + cuff. Possibly an adaptation of Middle English handcops (“shackles for the hand, handcuffs”), from Old English handcops, from hand + cops, cosp (“fetter, chains”), but due to a lack of continuity (centuries between Old English and the modern term), generally analyzed as a re-invention. Nominal form first appears c. 1591 in the publications of John Florio. Verbal form first appears c. 1649.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA