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Abstract:: The data in The Dictionary of Modern Chinese show that there are 23 HAND words, which are words referring to the hand, the parts of the hand or the activities involving the hand and are labeled as classifiers(or measure words). Apart from those 23 words, such words as: “寸cun(1/3 decimeter)”, “揸zha(the distance between top of the thumb and the index finger or middle finger when the hand wide spreads)”, “拳头quantou(fist)”, “巴掌bazhang(palm)”, and “指肚儿zhiduer(finger breadth)”, though not labeled as classifiers in the dictionary, can also act as measure words. In this paper, we put all of them into the same group so as to explore the motivations for their functioning as measure words. We argue that the classifier function of these words is the consequence of the interaction between the requirement of both accuracy and fuzziness for human language and the mechanism of human cognition which is characterized by ego-centrism, boundedness in construal, metaphorical thinking, and prototypicality in categorization.