Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A large, uniform, clerkly handwriting: so called from the large writing formerly used for the text of manuscript books, in distinction from the smaller writing used for the notes.
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
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Examples
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Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader — or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral — an alliterative, text-hand copy —
Villette 2003
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[Mr. Collier's] is of a mixed character, varying even in the same page, from the stiff, labored Gothic hand of the sixteenth century to the round text-hand of the nineteenth, a fact most perceptible in the capital letters.
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 47, September, 1861 Various
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It is written in text-hand, and is spelt backwards for the child's amusement.
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For the future I mean to write down engagements in a text-hand, and set them up somewhere in sight; but if I broke through twenty others as shamefully, it would not be with as much real grief to myself as in this fault to my dearest Mona Nina.
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Browning, Elizabeth B 1898
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Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader -- or rather let it stand, and draw thence a moral -- an alliterative, text-hand copy --
Villette Charlotte Bront�� 1835
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I mean to write down engagements in a text-hand, and set them up somewhere in sight; but if I broke through twenty others as shamefully, it would not be with as much real grief to myself as in this fault to my dearest Mona Nina.
The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II Elizabeth Barrett Browning 1833
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"Yet this is a difficulty that Mr. Collier has to explain; as the handwritings of the MS. corrections in the Devonshire folio, including those in pencil, vary as already said, from the stiff, upright, labored, and earlier Gothic, to the round text-hand of the nineteenth century." [
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 08, No. 47, September, 1861 Various
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When your brother and I took the book between us in wonderment at the notion ” we turned to the index, in large text-hand, and stopped at 'Miss B.' ” and he indeed read them, or some of them, but holding the volume at a distance which defied my short-sighted eye ” all I saw was the faint small characters ” and, do you know ...
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett Browning, Robert, 1812-1889 1898
whichbe commented on the word text-hand
A large hand in writing, so called because it was the practice to write the text of a book (the text-copy) in a large hand, and the notes in a smaller hand. Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828.
August 2, 2008