dead hand
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.98 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
3
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A penalty where a player continues to take their turns, but can no longer win or make tile calls for the remainder of the hand.
Countable; Uncountable
name
A weapons system, implemented by the Soviet Union and by the Russian Federation as the successor state thereof, capable of closing a strategic nuclear strike control loop in the absence of normal command and control channels, analogous in concept to a dead man's switch, in anticipation of a decapitation strike.
Example Sentences
- "I'll leave the very bad news to the end as it's outside the industry's control. Yes, the dead hand of the Department for Transport (DfT) still rules!"
- "Near-synonyms: doomsday weapon, doomsday device, doomsday bomb"
- "Sometimes people glibly speak as if the Dead Hand were a thing of the past, but it is foolhardy to assume so."
- "The system may no longer be a central element of Russian strategy—US-based Russian arms expert Pavel Podvig calls it now "just another cog in the machine"—but Dead Hand is still armed."
- "The talk then turned darkly to the prospects for building a Dead Hand of their own."