Degrees of freedom — DoF — is the count of independent ways a robot can move. Each joint that can rotate or extend is one degree. A human arm, from shoulder to fingertips, has about 27. A human body in total has somewhere between 200 and 250, depending on who's counting.
Humanoid robots don't get anywhere near that. The shipped fleets today land somewhere between 20 and 40 total degrees of freedom, with a handful in each leg, a handful in each arm, and the rest distributed between the hands and the torso. The number on a spec sheet is shorthand for how articulated the robot is — how many different positions it can hold, how many ways it can interact with the world.
The interesting question isn't "how many DoF does this robot have." It's "where are the DoF allocated."
A humanoid that puts 16 degrees of freedom into a single hand — like Figure 02 — is making a bet that the bottleneck for useful manipulation is dexterity. A humanoid with 6 DoF per hand — most of the field — is making the cheaper bet that grippers plus orientation control will be good enough for industrial work. A humanoid with no hands at all, just end-effectors like Agility's Digit, has made the bet that bipedal locomotion plus grippers is enough for logistics, and that hands are a problem to solve later.
None of these bets is obviously right. They're just bets about which capability gap is the hardest to close.
There's a related number that doesn't appear on every spec sheet but matters more than you'd think: DoF per hand. A robot with one DoF per finger plus a thumb opposition can pinch and grasp. A robot with three DoF per finger can manipulate. A robot with four or more DoF per finger and tactile sensors can start to approach what humans do without thinking about it. The Reality Score on a profile weights this distinction implicitly: a robot that can verifiably manipulate scores higher on "demonstrated capability" than one that can only grip.
If you're trying to read a spec sheet quickly, the questions to ask are: How much articulation in the hand? How much in the legs? And what's missing — what's the manufacturer not putting on the sheet at all?