Heads

How to spell heads

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heads

What does heads mean?

1. nounMore than one head; the upper parts of bodies or the tops or fronts of things.
2. verbLeads, is in charge of, or moves toward a particular place or direction.
3. nounThe side of a coin bearing a head or portrait, called when tossing.

Heads in a sentence

• noun

  The children bowed their heads during the ceremony.

• verb

  She heads the finance department from the downtown office.

• noun

  The referee tossed the coin and called heads before the match.

• noun

  Tall sunflowers turned their heads toward the morning light.

• verb

  Every weekday he heads straight to the gym after work.

• noun

  If it lands on heads, the home team chooses which end to defend.

Where does heads come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural and verb form of 'head', which descends from the Old English heafod, meaning the uppermost part of the body that holds the brain. That word goes back to a Proto-Germanic form heaubudam, a relative of the Old Norse haufuth and the German Haupt, all carrying the same basic idea of the top or chief part. Because the head is the leading part of the body, the word stretched early to mean a leader, a chief, or the front of anything, so to 'head' a group is to lead it. The plural ending -s and the third-person verb ending -s are spelled identically, which is why 'heads' covers both 'more than one head' and 'she heads the team'. The everyday coin sense, the side bearing a ruler's head, is recorded from the 1600s and gave us the familiar 'heads or tails' for a coin toss.

How the word is built

• head (from Old English heafod: top of the body)
• -s (plural noun and third-person verb ending)