single-handedness

English

Alternative forms

• singlehandedness

Etymology

single-handed +‎ -ness

Noun

single-handedness (uncountable)

1. The quality of having a dominant hand; left-handedness or right-handedness.
   • 1907, The New England Medical Gazette - Volume 42, page 325:

     Recent experiments and observations, however, prove that single-handedness is merely the result of faulty or restricted education. Careful observations have shown that out of every hundred persons born into this world eighty are congenitally ambidextrous — that is to say, they will instinctively reach for an object with either hand

   • 1913, Albert Henry Buck, A Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences:

     But as we rise in the evolutionary scale of normal creatures, and as we exclude disease, ambidexterity progressively gives way to single-handedness, generaly right-handedness.

   • 1936 January, “Hand Test for Stutterers Aids in Treatment”, in Popular Mechanics, volume 65, number 1, page 56:

     One step in my method of correcting the stutterer is to build up a single-handedness or sidedness in the individual.

2. Chirality
   • 2000, Nina Berova, Koji Nakanishi, Robert Woody, Circular Dichroism: Principles and Applications, →ISBN, page 529:

     In the complexes, the direction and affinity of the hydroxy group for hydrogen bond toward the carboxy group of poly-12 may be the most important factor to control both the helical sense and an extent of the single-handedness, and therefore, the complexes with amino alcohols showed an intense ICD independent of the bulkiness of the substituent (R) with the same Cotton effect signs as the primary amines.

   • 2008, CIBA Foundation Symposium, Biological Asymmetry and Handedness, →ISBN, page 26:

     So not only does the hand of the amino acids dictate the hand of the helix they form, but more profoundly, single-handedness appears to be necessary for helices to form at all.

   • 2009, Joseph Cambray, Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe, →ISBN:

     In scientific language this preferred single-handedness is referred to as homochirality; nature clearly exhibits this, but the exact origins of this trait remain shrouded at present, though various theories have been postulated to try to explain how it first arose.

3. Lack of assistance.
   • 2004, Samir Dasgupta, The Changing Face of Globalization, →ISBN:

     The process practices autarchy, exclusivism or single-handedness instead of a radical universalism, based on democracy and equality that can be achieved through a united struggle.

   • 2006, Judith Collier, J. A. B. Collier, J. Murray Longmore, Oxford Handbook of Clinical Specialties, →ISBN:

     In the UK, much of the progress in general practice over the recent past has evolved in the context of group practice and the primary health care team — the credo of modern-day doctoring. Single-handedness puts a question mark over the primacy and validity of these ideas.

   • 2007, Patrick Buckridge, Belinda McKay, By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland, →ISBN, page 7:

     Confronting the task nearly half a century later of making sense of Queensland's literary heritage, it seemed foolhardy to emulate our predecessors in their heroic single-handedness.

4. The quality of having or involving the use of only one hand.
   • 2006, Neil William Lerner, Joseph Nathan Straus, Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, →ISBN, page 75:

     Maurice Ravel wrote a Concerto pour piano en sol majeur for both a left hand and a right hand, whereas the Concerto pour la main gauche marks itself as different in its declaration of single-handedness.

   • 2009, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look, →ISBN:

     Although an extended period of visual contemplation may lead a viewer to notice the pianist's single-handedness, the scene encourages admiration for the achievement of technical skill against what are imagined as great odds.

   • 2012, Joe Fisher, Coming Back Alive: The Case for Reincarnation, →ISBN:

     First, imagine the minute hand has been removed so that the dial is complete in every detail but for its single-handedness.

   • 2013, Gerald Abraham, Peter Calvocoressi, Masters of Russian Music, →ISBN:

     Through over-practice of Balakiref's "Islamey" and Liszt's "Don Juan" Fantasia, he temporarily lost the use of his right hand. He regained it after a time, but it was during this period of single-handedness that he wrote the well-known “Prelude and Nocturne for the left hand only”, as well as a left-handed concert-paraphrase of a Strauss waltz, which has never been published.