Which hand to read in palmistry, for women and men

Not sure which hand? Take the which-hand quiz

Two questions settle it for most people:

1. Which hand do you write with? Start with that one.
2. Do you use both hands about equally? Then read each hand on its own.

This is the same for women and men. The lines and their meanings don’t change; some traditions change only which hand comes first, as explained below.

Your writing hand vs your other hand

Your writing hand is read as the life you are making: what you have built, and what you are building now. Your other hand is read as what you started with: your natural tendencies, before life and effort shaped them. Some books call the writing hand the dominant hand or the active hand, and the other one the passive hand.

The idea comes from Cheiro. In Palmistry for All (1916) he writes that the right hand “denotes the developed or active brain, the left only giving the natural tendencies or inclinations.” In Cheiro’s Language of the Hand he quotes an old saying: “The left is the hand we are born with; the right is the hand we make.”

Notice that Cheiro speaks of the right and the left hand. Reading them as your writing hand and your other hand is a later convention, and it is the one the PalmSays app follows.

Cheiro’s own rule was to examine both hands, and to depend more on the right, the hand that shows what a person has developed. He also warns against reading one hand alone. Place both hands side by side, he advises, and look for the reason behind any change.

Your writing hand is read as the life you are making. Your other hand is read as what you started with.

Active hand and passive hand

Benham names the two hands the active and the passive hand: the right is active and the left passive, the other way round for a left-handed person. The hand that does the work, he writes, records the present; the passive hand shows your natural gifts. People today also say the dominant and the non-dominant hand. All of these name the same split: your writing hand and your other hand.

Palm reading for female: which hand, and what to look at

For a woman, the answer in palmistry tradition is the same as for anyone: compare both hands, and read your writing hand as the life you are making. If you are right-handed, that is your right hand. If you are left-handed, it is your left.

You may have heard that a woman’s left hand should be read. That is an old custom, recorded by Mrs J. B. Dale in Indian Palmistry (1895), and we explain it in what the traditions say. Dale herself adds that you should take the hand where the lines are clearest.

What to look at doesn’t change. The four main lines are read the same way on a woman’s hand as on a man’s:

• The heart line, for your emotional style: how you feel and show affection.
• The head line, for how you think and make decisions.
• The life line, for energy and how you meet change. Its length is never read as lifespan.
• The fate line, for direction and work. Many palms show a faint one, or none, and that is common.

There are no separate “female lines”. And no line reads a woman’s fate, her marriage or her children.

Palm reading for male: which hand, and what to look at

For a man, too, compare both hands and read your writing hand as the life you are making. If you are a right-handed man, every custom points the same way: your right hand. The old Eastern rule that Dale records reads a man’s right palm, and so does the writing-hand convention.

If you are a left-handed man, the two customs split: the writing-hand convention reads your left hand, the old custom your right. Reading both, side by side, settles it.

What to look at is the same four lines as for anyone. There is no separate “male palm”, and no line says what a man is fated to become.

What the traditions say

Palmistry books don’t agree on which hand to read, so here are the main views, each from its source.

Tradition (book)	Hand read first	What the other hand shows
Western: Cheiro (1900, 1916)	Both, relying more on the right, the hand a person has developed	The left: the natural tendencies you were born with
Western: Benham (1900)	The active hand, the one that does the work (the left for a left-handed person)	The passive hand: your natural gifts
Indian: Dale, Indian Palmistry (1895)	A man’s right palm, a woman’s left; or the hand where the lines are clearest	The book gives no reading

People also ask about a Chinese rule for which hand to read. None of the books we use gives one, so we don’t list it.

• Cheiro (1900 and 1916): examine both hands, and depend more on the right, which shows what you have developed. He calls reading the left hand because it is “nearest to the heart” a superstition from the Middle Ages.
• William G. Benham (1900): read both hands. The passive hand shows your natural gifts; the active hand, the one that does the work, shows the present. He also rejects the “nearest the heart” idea: the heart, he points out, has no more to do with the left hand than the right.
• Mrs J. B. Dale, Indian Palmistry (1895): “The general rule in the East is that the right palm of the male and the left palm of the female ought to be examined.” In the same passage she advises: “take the hand in which the signs and lines are clearly shown.”

The Eastern custom is a real tradition, and we don’t dismiss it. But it is about which hand to look at first, not about different lines or meanings. The lines, and what the books say they mean, are the same on every hand.

Left-handed?

Swap the hands. If you write with your left hand, palmistry tradition reads your left as the life you are making, and your right as what you started with. Benham gives the same rule: for a left-handed person, reverse the order and treat the left as the active hand.

Cheiro adds an observation of his own: “left-handed people have the lines more clearly marked on the left hand, and vice versa.”

Ambidextrous?

If you use both hands about equally, or you aren’t sure, the writing-hand idea doesn’t apply. Read each hand on its own, for what its lines show. The PalmSays app does the same when it doesn’t know which hand you use most. The books we use give no separate rule for people who use both hands equally.

Which hand for each line?

For every one of the lines on your palm, the answer is the same: compare both hands.

• Heart line: a difference between the hands is read as a change in how you show affection.
• Head line: your writing hand is read as how you think now.
• Life line: on neither hand is its length read as lifespan.
• Fate line: your writing hand is read as the direction you are taking now.
• Marriage line: these small lines are hard to see in photos, and no hand gives a date or a number. The PalmSays app doesn’t read them.

Why your two hands look different

Most people’s two palms differ. Cheiro noticed that in some people hardly two lines are alike on both hands, while in others the difference is barely visible. He read a big difference as a more eventful life, one that had moved far from where it started.

There are plainer reasons too. Your two hands do different work every day, and a photo adds its own differences: light, angle and how flat the hand is can make a line look deeper, fainter or broken. So photograph both hands the same way, in the same light, before reading much into a difference.