dextrous

1 6.8

Good at moving the hands quickly and carefully

adjective
/ˈdɛkstrəs/

: diestro

She is very dextrous, easily juggling three balls at once without dropping any.

Examples

He'd never been particularly dextrous, and this obstacle appeared potentially dangerous, even to the most agile of sailors.

Fiction book (1992)
I don't have the hands for it, though, not, uh, dextrous enough.

Witchboard (1986)
Again, the song is all about the guitar work of Eddie Roberts, whose maneuvering is as dextrous as it is captivating.

Blog text (27)
The magician's dextrous hands amazed the audience as he performed intricate card tricks.
To assemble the model, you need to be dextrous enough to fit the small pieces together.

Synonyms

deft

vsdextrous

15 5.8

Quick and skillful with the hands when working

shares the same meaning but uses a different word form

dexterous

vsdextrous

3 7.2

Good at using hands to do careful tasks

emphasizes quick physical movement rather than general manual skill

sure-handed

vsdextrous

1 6.2

Skilled, steady, and confident when doing a task, often using the hands

focuses on speed and nimbleness rather than steadiness and confidence

Antonyms

clumsy

73 1.2

Moving in an awkward, unsteady way that causes accidents

inept

49 5.0

Not good at something and often clumsy

How Skillful

expert

3 3.5

adept

43 4.2

dextrous

1 6.8

skillful

34 2.8

competent

114 3.6

Surface Forms

dextrous positive

dextrouser comparative

dextrousest superlative

Morphology

dextrous = dexter (semi-transparent) = dexter + ous

The adjectival suffix '-ous' clearly forms the adjective, but the root 'dexter' is Latinate and not a productive or familiar English base for most learners.

Etymology

Dextrous comes from the Latin root dexter, which means 'right' and refers to the right hand as the usual skilled hand. So dextrous means being skillful and quick with the hands, and you can see the same idea in ambidextrous, where ambi- means 'both'.