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upper hand
noun
- the dominating or controlling position; advantage:
to have the upper hand in the fight.
upper hand
noun
- the upper handthe position of control; advantage (esp in the phrases have or get the upper hand )
Word History and Origins
Origin of upper hand1
Idioms and Phrases
Also, whip hand . A dominating or controlling position, as in Once you let Jeff get the upper hand there'll be no stopping him , or When it comes to checkers, my son-in-law generally has the whip hand . The first term alludes to an ancient game in which each player in turn grasps a stick with one hand, beginning from the bottom, and the last who can put his hand at the top wins. Its figurative use dates from the late 1400s. The variant alludes to the driver who holds the whip in a horse-drawn vehicle; it was being used figuratively by the late 1600s.Example Sentences
And as of early Tuesday, firefighters still had the upper hand against the fire.
Wales missed 32 tackles, conceded 12 turnovers and 12 penalties and, though they managed 18 successful line-outs, they could not quite gain the upper hand on the scoreboard.
Friday, however, at least gives the world's number-one side the chance to regain the upper hand in a rivalry that has transfixed the rugby world in recent years.
The cat-and-mouse game between Bruno and George provides the fun as each man always thinks they have the upper hand.
Now there’s a war raging inside her feeds between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris - and who appears to have the upper hand is different depending on which social media site she looks at.
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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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