What is the difference between 手招く and 招く? Google defines both of them as "beckon" and Jisho.org seems to define as "to beckon" and as a whole lot of things like "invite" etc. Does the "" simply indicate a "hand invite" of sorts i.e. to beckon exclusively, whereas can have several different interpretations?

[]{}, as the part would suggest, means "to signal a person using one's hand to tell that person to come near". The word, therefore, has a very limited meaning.

[]{} just means "to invite" in general. To a person to a party, you may use the phone, email, snail mail, etc. You probably do not someone to a "party" unless you are in the oldest profession in the world.

Thus, one could roughly say that is one kind of , but you should not use the two interchangeably at will.

Finally, has a few other meanings, the most important of which is "to cause" or "to bring about".

[]{}[]{}OP[]{}[]{} = "My odd answer caused the OP a misunderstanding."