Hand type
Square hand
Everything here reports what named old books claimed about hands. None of it is a statement about you or about anything to come.
In an older source
The square hand means the palm square at the wrist, square at the base of the fingers, and the fingers themselves square
Cheiro, The Language of the Hand (1897)
About this entry
Cheiro 1897 defines the square hand by three squares: the palm at the wrist, the palm at the base of the fingers, and the fingers themselves. He gives it the label of the useful hand and draws it on Plate II. D'Arpentigny uses the same label, Useful or Squared, in the list Heron-Allen translated in 1886.
Cheiro builds seven varieties on this shape. They are a square palm with square fingers that are short, square fingers that are long, and then knotty, spatulate, conic, psychic and mixed fingers. Each variety is the base palm with a different finger type set on it.
Some modern websites sort hand shapes into earth, air, fire and water, and often call this one the earth hand. None of the books used for this site does that. The earliest source for the four-element scheme has not been found, so it counts here as a modern practice.
Where this text comes from
Statements credited to an older writer follow the scanned or typed text named here, and those writers often disagree. Modern practice is labeled as modern.
- Cheiro, The Language of the Hand (1897)
Retrieved 2026-11-09
- d'Arpentigny, The Science of the Hand, trans. Heron-Allen (1886)
Retrieved 2026-11-09
Our own plain wording. Quoted lines keep the spelling of the scanned source.