Whitehead

How to spell whitehead

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce whitehead

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does whitehead mean?

1. nounA small skin blemish formed by a blocked pore capped with a pale, whitish head of trapped material.

Whitehead in a sentence

• She dabbed a spot treatment on the whitehead before applying makeup.

• The dermatologist explained that a whitehead forms when a pore clogs near the surface.

Where does whitehead come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent English compound built from two very old native words. The first element, white, comes from the Old English hwit, meaning bright, pale, or clear in colour, a word shared across the Germanic languages. The second element, head, descends from the Old English heafod, the word for the top part of the body and, by extension, the rounded top of almost anything. Joined together, the compound describes a small blocked skin pore capped with a pale, whitish dome; the dermatological use became common from the nineteenth century onward. Because both halves are everyday words spelled exactly as you would expect, the only real spelling point is remembering it is written as a single unbroken word with the silent first h of head buried in the middle.

How the word is built

• white (Old English hwit)
• head (Old English heafod); a compound noun