Your hand is the palm and fingers, up to the wrist; your arm runs from the wrist to the shoulder. If your language uses one word for both, choose by what it's doing. You hold, write, wave and signal with your hand; you hug and carry with your arms. A fracture above the wrist is a broken arm, not a broken hand.
arm or hand — can you pick the right one?
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in your hand; shake hands; hold hands; raise your hand; in your arms; break your arm; arm in arm
- She was holding a cup of tea in one hand and her phone in the other.
- He carried the sleeping child upstairs in his arms.
- I fell off my bike and broke my arm just above the elbow.
What changed
First versionAfter the fall, my hand was swollen from the elbow to the wrist.
RevisionAfter the fall, my arm was swollen from the elbow to the wrist.
It's easy to call the whole limb a hand. But the hand ends at the wrist, and the part between the elbow and the wrist is already the arm. One word changed.
In class you raise your hand or put your hand up, even though the whole arm goes up: what matters is the signal the hand gives. And arm in arm means with arms linked: They walked arm in arm along the river.
Your turn
She waved goodbye with one ___ and held her coffee in the other.
Show the answer
hand — You wave and hold a cup with your hand, so hand; the other here also means the other hand. Your arm runs from the wrist to the shoulder, and you don't hold coffee in it.
Describe how you carried your shopping home: what was in your hands and what was under your arm.
I had a heavy bag of potatoes in each hand and a loaf of bread under my arm.
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