The entries in this section are all descended from some root word either meaning or pertaining to the head, with the ten listed here having entered English from as diverse a group of languages as French, Welsh and Afrikaans. Besides such familiar terms as headlight, headcount and headline, the word head itself has contributed a similarly diverse collection of words to the language, including head-brand, a log positioned at the back of a fireplace; head-fake, a sporting term for a movement made with the head in an attempt to deceive an opponent; head-knee, part of the extended prow of a ship; and headborough, an old-fashioned English word for a local parish official or constable. The word headhunt, meanwhile, has been used since the 1960s to refer to the deliberate selection of a candidate for a job, but originally referred to the practice common amongst certain tribes of south-east Asia and the Amazon of hunting and killing members of rival tribes and collecting their heads as trophies.
Cabbage was first recorded in English in the late 1300s as cabache, a spelling which hints at its original derivation from an old French word, caboche or caboce, meaning ‘head’. This root is also the origin of the obscure English hunting term cabbage, meaning ‘remove a deer’s head at the antlers’, which is just one of a number of the word’s less familiar meanings. As well as being the name of a vegetable, a cabbage can also be a tailor’s offcut, an animal’s lair, a fascinator or decorative adornment on a hat, a sweetheart, a fool, money and even, in medical or surgical slang, a coronary artery bypass graft or CABG.
The word camouflage is a descendant of the French verb camoufler, meaning ‘to veil’ or ‘disguise’, which is in turn derived from an earlier Italian word, camuffare, combining capo, ‘head’, and muffare, ‘to muffle’. Camouflage is also likely related to camouflet, a French slang term for cigarette smoke blown into a person’s face, which gained a military context in English in the mid-nineteenth century when it came to be used to describe the smoking crater or cavern formed by a subterranean bomb. Similarly, on its first appearance in the language (as recently as 1917), camouflage was also a military term used to refer to the concealment of ships, guns and other paraphernalia from the enemy. Its zoological sense developed soon afterwards.
The word capitulate has been used as a verb meaning to ‘agree’ or ‘surrender to’ since the 1600s, yet on its first appearance in the language almost a century earlier it was originally an adjective, used to describe something set out in a series of directions or chapters; indeed, the verb capitulate originally meant ‘stipulate’ or, literally, to ‘draw up under headings’. It is derived from the Latin word capitulum, which is itself a derivative of the Latin for ‘head’, caput, from which such familiar English words as capital, captain, madcap and both biceps and triceps (‘two-headed’ and ‘three-headed’ muscles, respectively) are all similarly derived.
The prefix cephalo- derives from the Ancient Greek word kephale, which as well as referring to the most important or topmost part of something was also a Greek word for ‘head’. A cephalopod, consequently, is a creature with long, leg-like tentacles protruding from its head, like a squid or cuttlefish. The same root is found in a number of other English words, including encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain; cephalomancy, a form of divination in which the head is physically examined; and cephalostat, a type of headrest used during surgical operations. Bucephalus, the legendary horse of Alexander the Great, meanwhile, had a name literally meaning ‘ox-headed’.
Dating from the early fifteenth century, the adjective corporal, meaning ‘bodily’ or ‘physical’ (as in corporal punishment), is derived from the Latin for ‘body’, corpus, from which a number of other words like corpse and incorporate are also derived. The military rank of corporal, however, dates from the late sixteenth century and is believed to be alternatively derived from its Italian equivalent caporale, a derivation of the Italian word for ‘head’, capo, implying that a corporal would have been in charge of a body of troops.
First used in English in the 1830s, kop is a South African word for a hill derived via Afrikaans from an identical Dutch word meaning ‘head’. Only occasionally used in this geographical sense in English, the word is probably most familiar to British English speakers as a nickname used at certain football grounds – and in particular Anfield, home ground of Liverpool FC – for the largest or uppermost of the spectators’ terraces. In this context, kop has been adopted from Spion Kop, the name of a hill near Ladysmith in the east of South Africa that in January 1900 was the site of a famous battle of the Boer War. Six years later, Anfield’s Walton Breck Road stand was nicknamed the ‘Spion Kop’ by a local journalist who likened the sight of the 25,000 Liverpool supporters it accommodated to the Boer troops that had covered the hill ahead of the battle. The name has since been transferred to several other grounds across England, including those of Leeds United, Sheffield United and Sheffield Wednesday.
Dating from the early nineteenth century, the word kowtow is typically used in English as a verb meaning to ‘grovel’ or ‘give in to’, or else to ‘act in an obsequious manner’. It is of Chinese origin, derived from the Chinese phrase k’o-t’ou, literally meaning to ‘knock the head’, and in its earliest use in English referred to an ancient Chinese custom in which a person would place their forehead on the ground as a mark of deep respect or as an act of submission.
Although its exact origin is debatable, it seems likely that the word penguin originally derived from the Welsh phrase pen gwyn, literally meaning ‘white head’. Quite how a bird living in the furthest reaches of the southern hemisphere came to have a Welsh name, however, is something of a mystery, but it has been suggested that the word was first applied to the great auk, a large, flightless and now extinct black-and-white seabird once native to the North Atlantic. When European explorers first saw penguins on voyages to the southern hemisphere – the word was first recorded in writing in the logbook of Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind in 1577 – it is likely that they simply mistook the birds they saw for the auks they knew back home.
The word poleax dates from as far back as the fourteenth century in English as the name of a type of short-handled axe, variously used to cut ropes, butcher meat, slaughter animals, and as a close-combat weapon. It is derived from poll, an equally old English word for the top of the head, implying that as a weapon the poleax would have been especially effective in breaking the heads of animals or adversaries. As a verb, meaning to ‘kill’, poleax dates from the late nineteenth century, whilst the figurative use of the word to mean to ‘stun’ or ‘utterly astonish’ developed in the 1950s.
Used since the early 1500s in English to mean ‘irritable’ or ‘tetchy’, on its first appearance in the language the adjective testy actually meant ‘impetuous’ or ‘courageously headstrong’, the sense by which it appears in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer as far back as the 1370s. It is derived from an Old French word for ‘head’, teste, from which the Modern French word tête is also derived.