upper hand
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Puzzle #87 · August 27, 2025
Upper hand is an advantage—dominance in a situation. But the origin is older than you'd expect and the baseball explanation is wrong.
The phrase dates to the late 1400s from Middle English ‘over hond,’ and the true origin likely comes from an ancient hand-on-stick children's game where players grasp a stick from bottom to top, each placing a hand above the last. Whoever reaches the top has the ‘upper hand’ and wins.
Baseball didn't exist until 1839, so the popular ‘bat grip’ explanation doesn't work—it's an anachronistic fantasy people created to make sense of the phrase. The phrase is genuinely ancient and carries that weight: five hundred years of meaning that predates a whole sport. See more at https://grammarist.com/idiom/upper-hand/
The phrase dates to the late 1400s from Middle English ‘over hond,’ and the true origin likely comes from an ancient hand-on-stick children's game where players grasp a stick from bottom to top, each placing a hand above the last. Whoever reaches the top has the ‘upper hand’ and wins.
Baseball didn't exist until 1839, so the popular ‘bat grip’ explanation doesn't work—it's an anachronistic fantasy people created to make sense of the phrase. The phrase is genuinely ancient and carries that weight: five hundred years of meaning that predates a whole sport. See more at https://grammarist.com/idiom/upper-hand/
Puzzle Appearances
The expression upper hand has appeared in 2 puzzles:
- Puzzle #62 on August 2, 2025
- Puzzle #87 on August 27, 2025
Rate of Appearance in English Language Print
Google's Ngram project shows how often a pair of words has appeared in print every year since the 1800's.
Data from Google Books Ngram Viewer. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.
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