hand-waving

noun

hand-wav·​ing ˈhan(d)-ˌwā-viŋ 

variants or less commonly handwaving or hand waving

1

: movement with the hand or hands made as a signal to another

Over the last decade, the frenzied screaming and hand-waving on exchange trading floors has started to go the way of the horse and buggy.

—Gail Marks Jarvis

The woman and I cobbled together a lingua franca through hand-waving and the bits of Mandarin and Cantonese we both could understand.

—Madelyne Xiao

2

: insubstantial and unsupported or ineffective statements, arguments, actions, etc., especially when intended to distract or mislead

In many respects, his essay is the quintessence of the form, a frustrating exercise in bland soul-searching, misdirection, and hand-waving.

—Laura Miller

If this explanation seems a bit like hand waving, it is. Many of the details have not been worked out.

—Don Lincoln

… we never, ever take concrete steps to solve our problems, no matter how much handwaving we do.

—Matthew Dessem

—often used before another noun

a hand-waving theory/explanation/argument

Examples of hand-waving in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

There was much innuendo and hand-waving for something that was supposed to change the textbooks. —F.d. Flam, Twin Cities, 6 Aug. 2025

The technology is the most interesting part of the sequel, but there’s both far too much hand-waving and far too little curiosity about the imaginative devices on which the film is centered. —Richard Brody, New Yorker, 26 June 2025

In his op-ed, Bhattacharya engaged in hand-waving about the toll of COVID on children, nearly 1,700 of whom died of COVID, according to the CDC. —Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 5 June 2025

This is a growing movement that ought to be raising eyebrows and forthrightly made visible to its superficiality and smacks of a Jedi-trick look-the-other-way hand-waving. —Lance Eliot, Forbes.com, 5 May 2025

In Appropriate, Jacobs-Jenkins’s plotting involves a little hand-waving — the money involved in a real-estate deal, for instance, comes out just right for maximal discord — and in Purpose, there is a deeper sense of authorial overdetermination. —Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 17 Mar. 2025

Elon Musk’s We, Robot event last month, focused on robotaxi services, showed problematic hardware accompanied by a business plan that was all hand-waving. —Richard Bishop, Forbes, 4 Nov. 2024

The catch is that these companies might just be transferring their hand-waving from one set of words to another. —Scott Rosenberg, Axios, 15 July 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1827, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for hand-waving

• behaving
• engraving
• enslaving
• lifesaving
• repaving
• autoclaving
• misbehaving
• braving
• caving
• craving
• graving
• laving