Background Processing hand and foot verbs has been shown to activate the respective motor areas and to elicit beta desynchronization similar to movement execution ( van Elk et al., 2010 , Niccolai et al., 2014 ). Above that, oscillatory brain responses have shown that motor execution interferes with simultaneous verb processing ( Klepp et al., 2015 ). Objectives By exploiting the up- and down-regulation that anodal and cathodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) respectively exert on motor cortical excitability ( Nitsche and Paulus, 2000 ), we aimed at modulating semantic priming of action verbs. We expected that online anodal stimulation of the left hand motor cortex would slow down the processing of hand verbs by increasing cortical excitability and inducing the previously observed interference effect. The opposite outcome was expected for cathodal stimulation. Sham stimulation was used as a control condition in a double-blind within-subjects design. Methods The stimuli set consisted of disyllabic hand, foot, and non-body (abstract) verbs followed by shapes with rounded or pointed corners. Twenty healthy participants (10 females) were required to read the verbs and to perform a go/no-go task: (a) to respond only in trials with concrete verbs, (b) by pressing a manual button if the shape prompt had rounded/pointed corners and a foot pedal if the shape had pointed/rounded corners. Results Results showed a semantic priming effect consisting in significantly shorter reaction times to congruent verb type – response modality pairs. Cathodal stimulation resulted in less wrong answers for incongruent pairs compared to the sham condition. Responses to shapes following hand verbs were significantly faster in the cathodal compared to the anodal condition when responding with the hand. Conversely, button responses to shapes following hand and foot verbs in the anodal condition were slower compared to the sham condition. Conclusions Cathodal stimulation of the hand motor area appears to selectively improve processing of hand verbs. Anodal stimulation showed an interference effect unrelated to verb type, probably depending on modulation of both hand verbs processing and hand responses. As button responses were overall faster than pedal responses, the lack of modulation of the latter suggests either that the effect of tDCS on word processing is short-timed or that tDCS influenced both verb processing and hand responses.