Headline

How to spell headline

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce headline

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does headline mean?

1. nounThe bold title printed at the top of a news story to summarise it.
2. verbTo be the main performer or featured act at an event.

Headline in a sentence

• noun

  The morning paper ran the scandal as its lead headline.

• verb

  The band hoped to headline the summer festival next year.

• noun

  Editors argued for an hour over the wording of the front-page headline.

• verb

  A famous comedian will headline the charity gala on Saturday.

Where does headline come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Headline is a transparent English compound formed from 'head' and 'line', and both parts are deeply native words. 'Head' descends from Old English 'heafod', meaning the top of the body, which by extension came to mean anything at the top, leading, or chief; 'line' comes through Old English and Old French from the Latin 'linea', a string or row, originally a thread of flax (from 'linum', meaning flax). When printing developed, a 'head line' literally meant the line of type set at the top of a page or column. The modern journalistic sense, the bold title summarising a news story, settled into place during the nineteenth century as newspapers grew larger and competed for attention. Because both elements survive as ordinary modern words, the spelling holds no real surprises, though writers sometimes hesitate over whether to write it as one word, which it now is.

How the word is built

• head (top, leading part)
• line (line of text)