Meaning of whip hand | Babel Free

Definitions

1. The hand in which a horse rider holds the whip.
2. An advantage over another; the dominant position.
   idiomatic

Examples

““Aye, you may abuse me as you please,” said the good-natured old lady, “you have taken Charlotte off my hands, and cannot give her back again. So there I have the whip hand of you.””

“Of course I was a fool. My father has the whip hand of me, because he has money and I have none, and it was simply kicking against the pricks to speak as I did.”

“Even the purest of all the Lamaist sects—the Ge-lug-pa—are thorough-paced devil-worshippers, and value Buddhism chiefly because it gives them the whip-hand over the devils.”

“Mrs. Cavendish, however, was a lady who liked to make her own plans, and expected other people to fall in with them, and in this case she certainly had the whip hand, namely: the purse strings.”

“Few workers are unionised, and in the UK's increasingly flexible labour market, where it is almost impossible to quit a job and claim unemployment benefits, where zero hour contracts are still a feature and where self-employment is on the rise, employers have the whip hand.”

CEFR level