If you haven’t completed the left-handed test yet, you can use this link to go to the survey form (it contains 12 Left/Right questions and will only take you a minute to complete).
This page gives our analysis of the surveys completed so far. By 27 May 2015 34,271 people had completed the survey and they declared their handedness as:
| Do you consider yourself to be left or right handed? | ||
| Left | 25,317 | 74% |
| Right | 3,127 | 9% |
| Both | 5,398 | 16% |
| Not answered | 433 | 1% |
| Total | 34,271 | 100% |
Of the people that consider themselves to be left-handed this is the percentage that answered each question “Left”:
| Question | % Left |
| Writing hand (we assume that the other 3% of people who consider themselves left-handed but said they write right-handed were forced to change their writing hand when they were young and have not changed it back) |
97% |
| Cutting with scissors (a lot of people mentioned that they use scissors right-handed because that was all that used to be available and they have never changed) |
70% |
| Holding a bat (one handed) | 78% |
| Eating with a spoon | 94% |
| Holding a toothbrush | 92% |
| Brushing hair | 89% |
| Eye (using a telescope) | 74% |
| Ear (using a telephone) (some people mentioned that they hold the phone to their right ear to leave their left hand free for taking notes. LHC’s Keith just gets in a tangle, holding the phone to his left ear with his right hand so he can still write with his left!) |
79% |
| Foot (kicking a ball) | 64% |
| Folding arms, which is on top | 68% |
| Clapping, which hand is on top | 81% |
| Clasping hands behind back, which hand is doing the holding | 77% |
| Throwing a ball | 77% |
| Turning the pages of a book | 74% |
| Using a bat or club two-handed (hand on bottom) (this question cause a lot of confusion with people thinking about “bottom” differently if they were holding the bat or club down, e.g. cricket or golf, or up for e.g. baseball. What we meant was the hand on the bottom being the one nearest the hitting end of the bat. If this is your left, you will be facing to your right looking over your right shoulder to see the ball coming) |
65% |
The percentage of people who consider themselves left-handed who were graded at each of our levels were:
| Grading | % of total |
| Seriously Left-Handed (>90% score) | 46% |
| Mainly left-handed (60-90% score) | 44% |
| Left but mixed-handed (40-60% score) | 7% |
| Probably a Right-Hander! (0-40%) | 3% |
The overall average score for people who consider themselves left-handed was 83%
And the number of people who scored 100% was 3,710 (15% of all the left-handers)
Of the 5,398 people who consider themselves “Both handed”, 60% use their left hand to write, 30% to cut with scissors and 67% used a phone on their left ear. Their overall weighted score was 55%.
Please add your own comments or interpretations as comments at the bottom of this page.
If you haven’t completed the left-handed test yourself yet, you can use this link to go to the survey form
I am a guitarist. My main grumble is the lack of choice I have experienced over the years obtaining a decent instrument. I do envy my righty musician friends who can visit a music shop then pick and choose various instruments of the same model thus finding the one that feels right for them. Choices are better if you are a ‘Strat’ man but I am a Gibson fan and here – choices a more limited.
There wasn’t a category for this. I am a keyboard player who began playing accordian, then organ, and finally piano. It hasn’t helped my right hand with anything else!😄
I’m left-handed for most things but my left eye is weaker than my right one so I would use my right eye for a microscope. I use my right ear for the phone so that I can take notes and also because I hear slightly less clearly in my left ear. I’m not really sure which hand I would use for holding a bat or kicking a ball because I don’t do either but I was taught by right-handers and have never really found a natural way of doing these activities.
I have a left-handed son and also a left-pawed cat (he feeds himself with his left paw.
I’ve always been very left handed so a 90% score was what I expected. I even change my work computer mouse to left handed which confuses anyone who ever tries to use it! Seems perfectly normal to me of course but funny to see righties experience just one thing from the opposite perspective.
I have all left handed scissors and kitchen knives at home (difficult for the rest of the family), and was eternally grateful when L/R irons and kettles became the norm. My husband still puts the ironing board up back to front for me though!
If I have to read a document at work, I always go to the very last page first and scroll back up to the top before starting the proofing, as well as flicking through newspapers and magazines from the back. I was glad to read on ALH that that’s not just weird! And don’t even start me off on the kissing thing – how many times have I embarrassed myself with getting that wrong?!
One thing I’ve not seen mentioned much is sewing. I generally go in the opposite direction to righties, so not only was it difficult for me to be taught to crochet, knit, smock, blanket stitch, embroider etc when I was little, but equally hard to teach my daughter any of those skills.
I love being a leftie but boy is it tricky sometimes!
I’m so left-handed (I fell in the >90% Seriously Left-Handed Category surprise surprise!) that as I was growing up I wondered why I even had a right hand or arm. With the exception it was useful to help balance things I was trying to work on with my left hand! 😀
I hold the phone in my right hand and use my left ear if I need to write something down, otherwise I hold it in my left hand, the hearing in my left ear is so much better than my right.
As for holding a bat 2 handed I have no idea as I was always terrible at sport, I was told I looked awkward so if picked at al l was always the last person. Sometimes I was the scorer but as my writing was bad it was often illegible, I was forced to be right handed but when no one was watching I always used my left. I can’t even hold a pen up in my right hand now.
I used to cut with my left hand when I was a kid but our maid made me use my right hand to cut (because she said that I should do it with my right). So ever since I became comfortable cutting stuffs with my right hand.
My right eye is my dominant eye. I use my right hand to cut with a knife and scissors. I do not do things awkwardly as some left-handed people do. My Mother told me when I started school, there were 6 children that were left-handed in my class. Our teacher took extra time to teach us the proper way to hold our pencil, paper etc.
I attribute her help and my dominant right eye to my lack of awkwardness. Many people that I have worked with, or have been friends with for years, are surprised when they notice I am left-handed.
I discovered I was born left-handed when, taking a test at age 15, I was asked to hold a lightweight board with a hole in it with both hands at my waist and then bring it up to my eye. I looked through the hole with my right eye, and was told this was normal for a lefthander. Apparently my Father had insisted that I be taught to be a righthander. This was in the 1930’s and probably not unusual back then. My wife and our son are both total lefthanders.
I scored a 74 on the test. It doesn’t surprise me. Sports wise, I learned to throw and bat from a right handed person. All of the footwork necessary to throw hard, such as a baseball or football, I learned right-handed. It seemed natural to me, so I stayed with it.
I grew up in the 70’s, after they had stopped making kids change which hand they wrote with, but before much of anything was made for leftys. I learned to use a right-handed scissors because the only left-handed scissors available were tiny and had no cutting edge. You were almost better off tearing the paper instead, (hold with right hand and tear with the left). Oddly enough, I use a box cutter left handed.
We had six people in my family, my dad and I are lefty’s, two of my younger sisters are right-handed, but write with a hook, and my mom and my third younger sister write like a “normal” righty. By the way, I do not write with a hook, although in college, I wrote with the lines in my notebook vertical instead of horizontal.
When I was younger, I dreamed about marrying a left handed woman and we would make our house completely left-handed. That, sadly, did not work out. The closest I came is that my mother-in-law is left handed.
I too grew up in the 70s my second job I learned quickly was not for a left handed person using a cash register . This was impossible for me .