Left Hand Itching: Money Coming or Going? The Sources Disagree

Count them and the left palm is the money hand about as often as it is not. The split is not random either: the English county collections mostly send money to the right hand, and the Gaelic-speaking world sends it to the left.

This is the strongest pattern in the whole record, and no page currently ranking mentions it.

Walter Gregor, collecting in north-east Scotland for the Folk-Lore Society in 1881, sets out the whole itching catalogue and gives each hand a different job:

An itching in the eyes indicated tears and sorrow; in the nose, that a letter was lying in the post-office for you; in the palm of the right hand, that the hand of a friend was soon to be shaken; in that of the left, that money was to be received in a short time; in the soles of the feet, that a journey would shortly be undertaken.

The Irish Schools' Collection — gathered from schoolchildren across the country in 1937–39 — gives the same division independently, in at least three counties. From Garryhill in Co. Carlow:

If the left palm itches you are getting money. If the right palm itches it means a strange shake hands.

From Foxrock in Co. Dublin: "If your right hand itches you are going to get a shake-hands." And from Co. Louth: "If your left palm itches you will receive money."

So the right hand is not idle in these traditions. It has a different job — it is the hand you greet with, and its itch announces a person rather than a payment.

The two most-cited authorities on this omen each contradict themselves.

Jacob Grimm. In the numbered list of superstitions appended to Deutsche Mythologie, item 1036 reads: "If your right hand itch, you'll take money; if your left, you'll spend much." In his own supplement to the main text of the same work, he prints: "Whoever's right hand itches will have to give money out; whoever's left, will receive money."

A reader of the standard English translation can check both without leaving the set — volume three says the right hand pays, volume four says the right hand receives.

Worth knowing about item 1036: Grimm's own footnote sources that block of the list to a Silesian periodical of 1791–92. It is not a general German rule but one region's, recorded once.

Jonathan Swift. Polite Conversation (1738) fires off a chain of these clichés between three speakers — an itching elbow means a change of bedfellow, an itching hand means money, an itching eye means crying. In the London edition printed by Motte and Bathurst, Lady Smart says: "And my Right Hand itches; I shall receive Money." In the Dublin edition printed by George Faulkner the same year, the same line reads left.

Swift's point was that these sayings were already worn currency in 1738. Two of his own printers could not agree which hand they belonged to.

One nineteenth-century catalogue divides the omen a completely different way, and it is more elegant than the left/right quarrel.

In The Folk-Lore Journal of 1885, a contributor set out an "itching auguries" list in which the hand is split not by side but by surface:

Hand: palm, you will have money; back, you will give money.

The palm is the part that receives, the back the part that hands over — which is what those surfaces actually do. It is the only version of this omen that carries its own logic rather than borrowing the general idea that right is better than left.

American collectors recorded a mnemonic for the more familiar version. From New York, in Fanny Bergen's Current Superstitions of 1896: the right hand receives and the left spends, because R stands for receive and L for let go. A rule invented to make an arbitrary assignment memorable is a fair sign that the assignment was arbitrary.

Most of the advice attached to this omen online is unsourceable. One piece of it is very well attested indeed, in four independent collections, and it comes with rhymes.

From Shropshire, recorded by Charlotte Burne in 1883: "Rub it against wood, 'Twill sure to bring good." From a young woman in Clun, in the same collection: "When the palm of your hand itches, rub it against oak, as it is a sign of money coming."

The fullest version is in The Folk-Lore Journal of 1885:

Rub it on wood, sure to be good. Rub it on brass, sure to come to pass. Rub it on brick, sure to be quick.

In New England and New Brunswick, Bergen recorded it attached specifically to the left hand: "If the left hand itches and you rub it on wood, you'll receive money before the end of the week." And from Mount Desert, Maine, a different action entirely: clap the closed hand into your pocket.

As late as 1987 a man in Hampshire gave a folklorist a coarser version of the same rhyme, which is a fair measure of how long this one has lasted.

Two remedies you will read everywhere have no source. Spitting on the palm is not recorded as a response to an itch in any collection searched — spitting appears in these same books, but attached to money already received and to sealing a bargain by handshake, which are different customs. And "never scratch the left palm or the money disappears" could not be traced to any collection at all.

Less old than it is usually made to sound.

The earliest plain statement of the omen in English is John Melton's Astrologaster of 1620, a pamphlet listing superstitions its author thought ridiculous:

That when the palme of the right hand itcheth, it is a shrewd signe he shall receive money.

A sweep of some eight thousand English texts printed before 1620 turned up nothing earlier. Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584, which catalogues a great deal of popular belief, does not have it.

And three works that are routinely cited for this omen do not contain it. Nathaniel Homes's Dæmonologie of 1650 covers ears, eyes, nose and elbow — the word "palm" appears nowhere in the book. John Gaule's list of vain observations covers ear, eye, cheek and nose, with no hand. Francis Grose's Provincial Glossary of 1787 gives only the eye.

And Shakespeare is not evidence, quite. Julius Caesar has Brutus accuse Cassius of "an itching palm" — but that is the greed sense, not the omen. Shakespeare's contemporaries use it the same way: a 1614 sermon offers a bribe as ointment for "the itch in his hands," and Overbury has a man whose "fingers itch after a bribe." The standard dictionary of superstitions does print the line as its earliest entry, on the reasonable view that a metaphor needs a literal belief behind it. That is an inference worth knowing about, and it is not the same as an attestation.

Russia has it, unanimously, and with an explanation. Vladimir Dal's proverb collection gives it twice over: "The right palm itches for profit, the left for loss" and "The right palm itches — to receive, the left — to give money away." Note the noun: it is the palm, ладонь, not the hand.

Afanasyev offers the reasoning that no modern page bothers with — that the Slavic word for right also carries the meanings of correct, just and lawful, and that the same overlap runs through German recht and French droit. The right hand is the lucky one because the language had already decided the word was.

Two details complicate it usefully. The oldest Russian attestation, an eighteenth-century manuscript, has no left/right split at all — "and the palms itch: money to take," both hands together — which suggests the handedness is a later refinement. And the Slavic manuscript tradition of body-omen books inverts the proverbs, making the right side the unlucky one.

Ottoman Turkish has it, in writing, from the sixteenth century. The seğirnâme manuscripts read the body head to toe, and the palm is in there: if the inside of his right hand twitches, property comes in from an unseen quarter; if the inside of his left hand twitches, money is spent out of his hand. Modern field data from Turkish and Georgian communities inverts between towns, as usual.

China does not have it. This is worth stating because English pages routinely claim a Chinese hour-by-hour table for itchy hands. The Chinese body-omen literature is real and this site quotes it elsewhere — but its twelve-hour tables cover sneezing, eye-twitching, heart palpitation, ear-ringing, ear-burning and the ringing of a cauldron. There is no hand table. In the standard Song-dynasty text the characters for hand, palm and itch do not occur at all.

And there is no male/female rule. Not in the English, Scottish, Irish, American or German collections — and their silence is meaningful, because those same collections do make gendered rules elsewhere. Grimm has one for a woman's neck and throat. The tradition was perfectly capable of distinguishing men from women, and for hands it did not.

Japan has the omen and does not split it by hand at all. The national folk-belief database holds twenty-one records for an itching palm, collected from Ishikawa, Fukuoka, Iwate, Toyama, Nagano, Gunma, Niigata, Kōchi and Nagasaki, the earliest printed in 1932. The usual reading is not money but a gift — when the palm itches, you will receive something from someone — with money appearing in only two of the twenty-one. One Nagasaki record pairs it with the opposite surface: an itching palm means you are being praised, an itching sole means you are being badmouthed.

Not one of those twenty-one records distinguishes the right hand from the left. The left/right money rule that fills the English-language pages is simply absent from the Japanese record — which is worth holding beside Grimm printing both versions and Swift's two printers disagreeing.

Most itchy palms are ordinary — contact with something irritating, hand eczema, dry skin, or pompholyx, a blistering eczema of the palms and soles where the itch often arrives before the blisters. Scabies is worth ruling out too: it favours the finger webs and is worse at night.

But there is one presentation that is urgent, and it is specific to this part of the body.

Itching of the palms and soles during pregnancy, typically worse at night and without any rash, can be a sign of intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy — a liver condition that needs assessment. The NHS advice for this is not "book an appointment" but to contact your maternity unit or call 111. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists puts the key detail plainly: the main symptom is itching of the skin without any rash.

Outside pregnancy, liver disease generally can present the same way. The American Academy of Dermatology notes that when itch is a sign of liver disease, it often starts on the palms and soles and spreads from there.

See someone about itching that lasts more than two weeks, disturbs your sleep, covers your whole body, or comes with weight loss, fever or night sweats.

Two things you will read that are not supported. Itchy palms are not a recognised sign of diabetes — the dermatological guidance on diabetic skin does not mention palms, and where diabetes causes itching it is generally elsewhere. And statins are not among the medications named as causes of itching; opioids and some blood-pressure drugs are.