get/have a handle on

idiom

informal

: to understand and be able to deal with (something)

I can't quite get a handle on the way this machine works.

It seemed like she had a good handle on the situation.

Examples of get/have a handle on in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

To try to get a handle on just those numbers, since November, The Bee has been requesting the annual report which should have been posted publicly in February 2023, and for an explanation. —Joe Rubin, Sacramento Bee, 23 June 2024

But rather than try to get a handle on how reliable these results are overall, there’s another question to ask here: If Google’s AI Overview gets something wrong, who is responsible if that answer ends up hurting someone? —A.w. Ohlheiser, Vox, 23 May 2024

Almost all attempts to get a handle on this question have required physicists to artificially extricate themselves from the accelerating universe and imagine viewing it from the outside. —Edgar Shaghoulian, Scientific American, 1 Sep. 2022

India must also get a handle on its China challenge. —Michael Kugelman, TIME, 5 June 2024