Adjective: offhand
Comparison Forms
Synthetic
Perifrastic
| Comparative | more offhand |
| Superlative | most offhand |
Sample Sentences
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She gave an offhand speech.
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He must also be fluent in obscenity, offhand in sex. Most important of all, he must play tough. [1976 June 7, Nik Cohn, “Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night”, in New York Magazine:]
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He doesn't realise how hurtful his offhand remarks can be.
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In September 2019, on the papal plane en route to Mozambique, Francis acknowledged the sharp opposition he faced from conservative detractors in the United States in an offhand remark. He said, it was “an honor that the Americans attack me.” [2025 April 21, Jason Horowitz, Jim Yardley, “Francis, the First Latin American Pope, Dies at 88”, in The New York Times:]
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She was quite offhand with me yesterday.
Adjectives inflected like offhand
priest-ridden,
unreposed,
evadible,
dissentious,
dissentient,
unforesighted,
egocentrical,
unephemeral,
unennobling,
mensuralist,
flocculent,
unseductive,
whoopsy,
whooshy,
surrogate,
Nicodian,
unrepaired,
prismatoidal,
renorenal,
unseducible, etc. (List truncated at 20 adjectives)
Etymology
From Middle English *ofhande, *ofhende, from Old English ofhende (“absent, lost”), ultimately from Proto-Germanic *abahandijaz. Equivalent to (and re-formed as) off- + hand. Cognate with Icelandic afhendur. Compare onhand.