Why do hands have so many bones?

	Tweet			Pin It
0

There are 27 bones in a human hand, including the 8 bones that make up the wrist. There are 3 bones in each of our 4 fingers, 2 bones in each thumb, and another bone under each finger and thumb that runs through the palm to the wrist.  That’s a lot of bones in a pretty small space!

A hand needs that many bones because a hand does a lot of different things! It waves, it grasps, it pinches, it snaps, it scoops, it plays Rock-Paper-Scissors, it pushes, it pulls and it does a lot of other things too!  Our hands need to be in different shapes to do each of those things. In order to be flexible enough, we need a lot of bones.

Bones don’t bend. Imagine that your finger had only one bone. It couldn’t do very much. You could poke things, but that’s about it. Luckily each finger has 3 bones, so we can bend them to do thinks like type, write, and play instruments.

Fingerspelling

How many ways does your hand bend? It’s a lot! Think about all the things that you do with your hands and the shapes that your hands have to make to do those things.

For people who use American Sign Language, the entire alphabet is done just by using different hand shapes on one hand. They don’t use this alphabet for every word, but they do use it like most people do—when they need to spell something.

Try using the signed alphabet (called the American manual alphabet) to spell your name. Think about the shapes your hands need to make to form each letter. How are all those bones in your hands useful for fingerspelling?