What Is Sleight of Hand?

Sleight of hand is the skilled handling of small objects, such as cards, coins and balls, so that the audience sees something impossible happen. It relies on practice and timing rather than special equipment. Magicians also call it prestidigitation or legerdemain, and it is the foundation of close-up magic.

What does sleight of hand mean?

Sleight is an old English word for cunning or craft. It comes from the Old Norse slœgð, the same family as the word sly. It has nothing to do with slight, despite the spelling. "Sleight of hand" therefore means cunning of the hand: dexterity used to deceive.

The phrase has three common uses today.

• Cheating at cards. A card cheat who manipulates the deck at a gambling table is using sleight of hand. This is the oldest sense outside the theater, and the reason casinos watch hands closely.
• Games. In Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition, Sleight of Hand is a Dexterity skill. Players roll it to pick a pocket, plant an object on someone or perform a trick. Many video games borrow the term for similar actions.
• Magic. The use this article is about: deceptive skill performed openly, for an audience that knows it is being fooled and has agreed to enjoy it.

The phrase is also used loosely for any clever misdirection, from accounting to politics. That meaning comes from the magic one.

What is sleight of hand magic?

Sleight of hand magic is magic that depends on the performer's hands rather than on apparatus. A card changes, a coin vanishes, a signed object turns up somewhere it cannot be. The props are ordinary and often borrowed. The deception happens in the handling.

It is most at home in close-up magic, where the audience stands within arm's length. At that distance there is no stage or lighting to help. Whatever the audience sees has to survive close inspection, from the front, the sides and sometimes from above.

Sleight of hand technique

Magicians do not explain methods, and this article will not either. What can be described is what the technique demands.

1. Naturalness. A good sleight looks like nothing. The hands move the way anyone's hands would move. If a gesture looks careful or strange, the audience notices it.
2. Practice. A single sleight can take months to learn and years to perform without thinking. Magicians practice in front of mirrors and cameras to check every angle.
3. Timing. The same action can be invisible at one moment and obvious at another. Much of the skill lies in knowing when.
4. Attention. Sleight of hand works together with misdirection: the management of where people look and what they remember. Neither works well alone.
5. Restraint. Strong performers use the least skill necessary for each effect. Showing off dexterity tells the audience where to look.

None of this is visible in a good performance. The audience should leave thinking about what happened, not about the hands.

Where the word prestidigitation comes from

Prestidigitation is a 19th-century French coinage. It is usually credited to a performer named Jules de Rovère, who called himself a prestidigitateur in the late 1810s. Sources give dates between about 1815 and 1819. The word combines the sense of preste (quick, nimble) with the Latin digitus (finger), so it reads as "quick fingers." English adopted it soon after.

Legerdemain is older. It comes from the French léger de main, "light of hand," and has been used in English since the 15th century.

A short history of sleight of hand

Conjurors performed with small objects for centuries before anyone wrote down how. The history below covers three figures who changed how the craft was performed and taught. For a longer account, see the history of magic in Sleight's Magic Encyclopedia.

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871)

Robert-Houdin was born in Blois, France, in December 1805 and trained as a watchmaker. In 1845 he opened his own small theater at the Palais-Royal in Paris, presenting his Soirées Fantastiques. He performed in a refined setting, in the manner of a gentleman entertaining guests, rather than as a fairground wizard. That approach is a large part of why he is often called the father of modern magic.

In 1856 the French government sent him to Algeria to perform, in an effort to undercut local religious figures whose displays of apparent power were feeding unrest. Decades later, a young performer born Erik Weisz took his stage name in tribute: Houdini. More in the encyclopedia entry on Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin.

S. W. Erdnase and The Expert at the Card Table (1902)

In 1902 a book titled The Expert at the Card Table was self-published in Chicago under the name S. W. Erdnase. It is widely considered the most influential book ever written on card handling. Much of it is written for the card cheat; a smaller section covers legitimate conjuring.

Nobody knows for certain who wrote it. Read backwards, the name gives E. S. Andrews, and that has fueled more than a century of theories. Researchers have proposed several candidates, but none has been proven. The book remains in print and is still studied by serious card magicians.

Dai Vernon (1894–1992)

Dai Vernon was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1894 and died in California in 1992. He studied Erdnase from a young age and spent his life refining card and coin magic toward one goal: that every action should look natural.

Around 1919 to 1922 (accounts differ), Vernon performed a card effect for Harry Houdini several times in a row, and Houdini could not explain it. Vernon was billed afterward as "The Man Who Fooled Houdini." Magicians called him "The Professor." From the 1960s he lived and taught at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, where generations of close-up performers learned from him. Read more in the entry on Dai Vernon.

Sleight of hand today

Sleight of hand is still the core of close-up and card magic. The props have barely changed in a century; the standards have risen. Phillip Moore's own work centers on sleight of hand and card manipulation, performed table to table and in a seated parlour show. See shows for how that looks at an event.