For the past several weeks, I've been trying to figure out the word for what a “handyman” does. Last night I heard someone on the TV downstairs say “this is my handiwork,” and the connection suddenly seemed so obvious.
Earlier today I did some research—looking through the dictionary definitions of both words and using Google Advanced Search to try to find cases in which the two words were used together—in hopes of confirming my theory. However, I was unable to find any reference to the words ever being used together.
So my question is twofold:
- Are handyman and handiwork at all related?
- If not, is there a word to describe the work that a handyman does?
Best Answer
The word handiwork first appeared in Old English, where it was written as two words, hand ᵹeweorc meaning “hand work”. The OED provides this citation:
That smattering of Old English might in Early Modern English run more along the lines of “And ye shall worship foreign gods, the work(s) of men’s hands.”
About the word’s history, the OED also writes:
Morphologically, that ᵹeweorc there was a past participle form; think modern wrought. In this particular instance ᵹeweorc was functioning as a collective, so more in the sense of works than just plain work. Its curious ᵹe-/ge-/ye-/y-/i- prefix you might recognize from German past participles; it’s the same as we see in the archaic word yclept. Middle English saw OE handgeweorc worn down to things like hondiwerc and handiwork.
Because Modern English past participles did not survive with their Germanic prefix intact, in Late Middle English handiwork = hand + iwork was reanalysed as handiwork = handi + work instead, creating a novel adjective handy and applying it to the noun work.
So our word handy came from people thinking that the y- from the obsolete ywork got moved over to the noun hand in handiwork to make an adjective: handy work. Handy therefore originally meant manual in that it was hand + y, but it has come to mean more than that by extension. handy is more apt to mean “useful” than manual when used standalone.
So yes, handyman is indeed related to handiwork, but not at all in the way one might imagine. The adjective handy came from handiwork through reanalysis, and then later got applied to the various manual labors of a handyman.
The word handicrafts also comes from that reanalysis to create a compound word for craftwork done by hand. Handicap is less clear, however.