Right Hand Itching: What It Means, and Where the Belief Came From

The first plain statement of this omen in English comes from a pamphlet whose author thought it was nonsense. John Melton's Astrologaster, or the Figure-Caster of 1620 lists superstitions in order to mock them, and item twenty-three reads:

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

That is the source everything downstream rests on, and nothing earlier has been found. A sweep of roughly eight thousand English texts printed before 1620 turned up no statement of the belief — including Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584, which catalogues popular practice at length and would have had every reason to include it.

One small point of citation hygiene, since it has been copied for two centuries: Melton's list begins on page 45, but the palm item is on page 46. Brand cited the wrong page in the nineteenth century and everyone has repeated it since.

Between Melton and the eighteenth century the trail is thin. The only witness found in between is a 1732 book of memoirs, in a chapter on omens: "Others have thought themselves secure of receiving Money, if their Hands itched."

This is worth stating plainly, because the same three names appear under this omen across the internet and in some printed books.

*Nathaniel Homes, Dæmonologie, 1650. Frequently cited for the itching palm. It covers ears, eyes, nose and elbow. The word palm* does not occur anywhere in the book.

*John Gaule, Mag-astro-mancers Posed and Puzzl'd, 1652.* His famous list of "vain observations and superstitious ominations" includes the tingling ear, the itching eye, the glowing cheek and the bleeding nose. No hand. He does discuss palms twenty pages later — but that is palmistry, the reading of lines, which is a different practice entirely.

*Francis Grose, Provincial Glossary, 1787.* His section on sympathetic omens gives the burning cheek, the burning ear and the itching eye. The hand is absent, in both the 1787 edition and the 1811 reprint.

One further warning about Homes: both Brand and Hazlitt quote his passage and both drop a clause by eye-skip, losing "it betokens sorrowful weeping; if the left eye itcheth." If you need Homes, take him from 1650 and not from his quoters.

Cross the border and the omen changes job.

Walter Gregor, collecting in north-east Scotland for the Folk-Lore Society in 1881:

...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.

The Irish Schools' Collection, gathered from schoolchildren in 1937–39, records the same division independently in at least three counties. From Garryhill, Co. Carlow: "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." From Co. Louth, the other half of the pair: "If your left palm itches you will receive money."

This is a coherent alternative rather than a mistake. The right hand is the hand you greet with; its itch announces a person. The left, which does none of that work, gets the money.

Against it stand the English county collections. Henderson recorded the right hand as the receiving hand in Durham; Charlotte Burne recorded the same in Shropshire in 1883: "If your right hand itches, you will receive money; if your left hand, you will pay money."

Two of the most-cited names on this subject each print both answers.

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

In the standard English translation the two sit in different volumes — volume three has the right hand paying, volume four has it receiving — so a reader can check both without leaving the set. Grimm's footnote traces the numbered item to a Silesian periodical of 1791–92, which makes it one region's rule recorded once, not a general German one.

Jonathan Swift. Polite Conversation, 1738, has three speakers rattle off the clichés in sequence — an itching elbow, an itching hand, an itching eye. In the London edition Lady Smart says "my Right Hand itches; I shall receive Money." In the Dublin edition of the same year the line reads left.

And in The Connoisseur of March 1755, a satirical catalogue of body omens states it the other way round from Melton: "If your right hand itches, you will pay away money; if your left, you will receive."

So within English print alone: 1620 right receives, 1738 London right receives, 1738 Dublin left receives, 1755 right pays, 1883 right receives.

One remedy is genuinely well attested, in four independent collections, and it rhymes.

From Shropshire, 1883: "Rub it against wood, 'twill sure to bring good." From a young woman in Clun, in the same book: rub it against oak. The fullest version appears 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.

American collectors recorded it too, and one New York informant supplied the memory aid that gives the game away: the right hand receives and the left spends because R stands for receive and L for let go. A mnemonic invented to hold an arbitrary rule in place is decent evidence that the rule was arbitrary.

The same 1885 catalogue offers a division that makes far better sense than left versus right: palm, you will have money; back of the hand, you will give money. The receiving surface receives.

Two pieces of advice repeated everywhere have no source at all. Spitting on the palm is not recorded in any collection as a response to an itch — spitting appears in these books, but attached to money already received and to sealing a bargain. And "never scratch the palm or the money disappears" could not be traced anywhere.

Russia agrees with England, and explains why. Vladimir Dal's proverbs: "The right palm itches for profit, the left for loss." The noun is the palm, ладонь, not the hand.

Afanasyev supplies the reasoning nobody quotes: the Slavic word for right also means correct, just and lawful, and the same overlap runs through German recht and French droit. The right hand is fortunate because the language had already loaded the word. Two complications worth carrying: the oldest Russian attestation has no left/right split — "and the palms itch: money to take", both hands at once — and the Slavic manuscript tradition of omen-books reverses the proverbs, making the right side unlucky.

Ottoman Turkish has it in writing from the sixteenth century. The seğirnâme manuscripts read the body head to toe, and the palm is included: 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. Right in, left out — the English rule, four centuries ago, in Ottoman Turkish.

China does not have this omen. That matters because English pages routinely present an hour-by-hour Chinese chart for itchy hands. The Chinese body-omen literature is real and this section quotes it elsewhere — but its twelve-hour tables cover sneezing, eye-twitching, heart palpitation, ear-ringing, ear-burning and the ringing of a cauldron on the stove. There is no hand table in it. In the Song-dynasty source the characters for hand, palm and itch do not appear at all. What China has instead is palmistry, which reads the lines of a hand rather than a sensation in it.

No source gives a different reading for women. The English, Scottish, Irish, American and German collections have no male/female rule for hands — and the omission is meaningful, because those same collections do gender other omens. Grimm has a rule specifically for a woman's neck and throat. The tradition could distinguish, and for hands it chose not to.

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 an irritant, hand eczema, dry skin, or pompholyx — a blistering eczema of the palms and soles in which the itching often begins before any blisters appear. Scabies is the benign condition most worth ruling out; it favours the finger webs and is worse at night.

One presentation is urgent and specific to this part of the body. Itching of the palms and soles in pregnancy, typically worse at night and with no rash, can indicate intrahepatic cholestasis of pregnancy. The NHS advice here is not to book an appointment but to contact your maternity unit or call 111. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists states the distinguishing feature plainly: the main symptom is itching without any rash.

Outside pregnancy, liver disease can present the same way — dermatological guidance notes that when itch is a sign of liver disease it often begins on the palms and soles and spreads.

See someone about itching that persists beyond two weeks, disturbs your sleep, spreads over your whole body, or arrives with weight loss, fever or night sweats.

Two claims worth correcting. Itchy palms are not a recognised sign of diabetes; the dermatological guidance on diabetic skin does not mention them. And statins are not among the drugs named as causes of itching — opioids and some blood-pressure medicines are.