a.

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  1.  Having four feet which resemble the hands of a man; quadrumanous.

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1774.  Goldsm., Nat. Hist. (1776), IV. 249. Animals of the monkey kind…. From this general description of four-handed animals, we perceive what few advantages the brute creation derive from those organs that, in man, are employed to so many great and useful purposes.

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1833.  Tennyson, Poems, To ——, 3.

        When, in the darkness over me,
  The fourhanded mole shall scrape,
Plant thou no dusky cypresstree,
  Nor wreathe thy cap with doleful crape,
  But pledge me in the flowing grape.

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1846.  Owen, Brit. Fossil Mammals & Birds, 3. A temperature sufficiently high for arboreal Mammalia of the four-handed order.

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  2.  Suitable for four persons. Also, rarely, of a piece of pianoforte music: Adapted for four hands (Fr. à quatre mains), i.e., two players; a duet.

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1824.  Miss Mitford, Village, Ser. I. (1863), 217. If we could both have won—if it had been four-handed cribbage, and she my partner.

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1840.  Dickens, Old C. Shop, xxix. We’ll make a four-handed game of it, and take in Groves.

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1885.  Pall Mall G., 20 March, 5/2. Among those who are wedded to their first love of normal chess, the four-handed game does not gain much favour.

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