handsome

1350–1400; Middle English handsom easy to handle (see hand, -some¹); cognate with Dutch handzaam tractable

1. See beautiful.

Handsome has not gone through as many changes in meaning as nice has, but it has gone through enough. Handsome has only a few related words outside English. In West Frisian, the language most closely related to English and spoken in the northern Netherlands, hānsum means “easy to manage or control, convenient,” as do Dutch handzaam and German handsam.
In the English of the mid-15th century, when this word was first recorded (as hondsom ), it meant “easy to handle” (obsolete now); by the mid-16th century handsome developed the senses “convenient, handy, suitable” (also obsolete) and “courteous, gracious,” and then “generous, noble, magnanimous.” Here we see the development from a meaning closely related to hands to one that simply implies their existence (behind the generosity).
The sense “(of a person) having an attractive appearance” dates from the late 16th century; the sense of “fairly large, considerable (as of an amount of money)” also dates from the latter half of the 16th century.