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

The earliest recorded statement about this superstition in English comes from John Melton's Astrologaster pamphlet of 1620. Although he was mocking astrology and its practitioners at the time, this is the first record we have found of someone explaining this omen.

For anyone looking, however, there are no other records for another century. No earlier versions of it were found in 8 thousand texts from before 1620. Nor did Reginald Scot, who wrote a lot about these beliefs in his book The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), ever discuss it there.

During that time in between, the next known record was a 1732 book of memoirs.

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.

In Scotland and Ireland the left hand receives while the right hand shakes hands. When someone itches their right hand they expect a greeting or a handshake; when someone itches their left hand they know that money is coming to them.

This is recorded in schoolchildren's writing in three Irish counties, independently. When the right palm is itchy it is time to shake hands; when the left palm is itchy money will be given.

Henderson found that right-hand itching was said to mean receiving in Durham while Charlotte Burne recorded this in Shropshire as well.

Two of the most-cited sources on this topic each print both answers. Jacob Grimm says that if your right hand itches you'll pay money but if your left itches you will receive.

Jonathan Swift has three speakers talking in sequence about an itching elbow, hand and eye, and in one of those lines Lady Smart says that if her right hand itches she will receive money. In another edition, however, the line reads left receives. Later, a periodical called The Connoisseur includes another example with the opposite meaning.

With those sources alone you can trace these two answers through English print: 1620 receiving money on the right, 1738 London receiving money on the right, 1738 Dublin receiving money on the left, 1755 paying away money on the right and 1883 receiving money on the right.

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 hands are caused by something normal like rubbing against an irritant, dry or irritated skin, or blisters in a condition called pompholyx that cause itching before the bumps appear. You might have scabies where you scratch more at night. If your palms itch when pregnant and it's worse at night without any red patches on your skin, contact your maternity unit or call 111.

If the itching lasts longer than two weeks, gets in the way of sleep, spreads all over your body, or is with weight loss, high temperature (fever) or night sweats, see a doctor. Palms itch may not be a sign you have diabetes; they do talk about diabetic skin but don't mention palms. Some people think it might come from taking statins; really the things that cause itching are opioids and maybe other medicines.