I was composing an email to a friend today that contained a description of my nephew standing in front of me, hand out, in expectation of payment for a household chore. The trouble began when I realized that I didn't specify in the email whether his hand was palm-up or -down - or sideways for that matter; I merely said "hand out, in expectation of payment". But if that phrase is sufficient to describe the entire hand position (as well as body posture and head attitude no doubt), what's the word for the gesture? Okay, there are lots of gestures I know the word for:
- The Finger
- The Fist
- The Shocker
etc.

But with the exception of "Fist", the others that I could think of seemed to lack antiquity. But surely there must be elements of our language that describe hand positions (excluding whole-arm gestures like "wave" and "salute"). It's not the action I'm interested in, but the hand/finger configuation. Without Googling, see how many you can think of. Remember, we want to exclude words and phrases that smell of modernity ("The Bird"), whole arm motions ("Salute"), foreign words ("Vitarka Mudra") and motions or gestures that are ambiguous in the precise hand configuration ("beckon" can mean crooking the forefinger, flexing the hand rapidly or a whole-arm sweep). Imagine instead a picture of somebody with their hand in a fixed position and fingers in a fixed configuration and tell me the name. I think we should allow terms found only in an excellent engish dictionary and avoid descriptive phrases ("hands in prayer"), but let's see how far we get.

My first and only contribution at this point is:
fist