"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 26/10/17 (handsome)

I had an e-mail from Moira. Didn't want to give her last name. But Moira is a keen viewer of Coundown, so thanks for writing in. And she wanted to know what the "hand" is doing in "handsome". It's a good question. Again, it's one of those words that you don't usually question. And the earliest evidence for it is surprisingly early - it's 1440. And it's an English-to-Latin bilingual dictionary for kids. And it says, "Handsum, of esy to hond werke"- hand work - "manualis". That was the Latin translation. And essentially, they were saying that something handsome was easy to control or... or handleable, if you like. So, how do you go from something that's easy to handle to striking? Well, it's a kind of... process that happens a lot in English, really. If you thing about something that's easy to use, as I say, a sort of malleable in some way, that it makes life a lot easier. It's sutable for a particular job, it makes life agreeable and pleasant. And handsome slipped into English really to mean well proportioned and elegant arount the 16th century. So things could be particularly handsome because they looked nice as well as being sutable for a particular job. And of course these things nice and thn people could start to look nice, too, and it was Spenser, Edmund Spenser, who was one of the first to use it in his famous Faerie Queene. And then Shakespeare, who loved his Spenser, use it in Richard III in one of his big rants. He talks about "a handsome stripling". So, it's a long, long journey that handsome has taken through the ages. But "hand" is still preserved there, really, if you think about sort of manual work and how that was its original meaning.