head vs tail

head

noun
  • The glans penis. 

  • A heavy or habitual user of illicit drugs. 

  • The end of a hammer, axe, golf club, or similar implement used for striking other objects. 

  • The end of a pool table opposite the end where the balls have been racked. 

  • A headdress; a covering for the head. 

  • A milling head, a part of a milling machine that houses the spindle. 

  • The end of a rectangular table furthest from the entrance; traditionally considered a seat of honor. 

  • The uppermost part of a valley. 

  • The antlers of a deer. 

  • Mental or emotional aptitude or skill. 

  • A headache; especially one resulting from intoxication. 

  • The part of a disk drive responsible for reading and writing data. 

  • The headstock of a guitar. 

  • The leafy top part of a tree. 

  • The top edge of a sail. 

  • A clump of seeds, leaves or flowers; a capitulum. 

  • The rounded part of a bone fitting into a depression in another bone to form a ball-and-socket joint. 

  • The toilet of a ship. 

  • An ear of wheat, barley, or other small cereal. 

  • A machine element which reads or writes electromagnetic signals to or from a storage medium. 

  • Tiles laid at the eaves of a house. 

  • The end of a nail, screw, bolt, or similar fastener which is opposite the point; usually blunt and relatively wide. 

  • A drum head, the membrane which is hit to produce sound. 

  • Headway; progress. 

  • Mind; one's own thoughts. 

  • Topic; subject. 

  • The end of an abscess where pus collects. 

  • The topmost, foremost, or leading part. 

  • The top part of a lacrosse stick that holds the ball. 

  • Deposits near the top of a geological succession. 

  • The source of a river; the end of a lake where a river flows into it. 

  • The foam that forms on top of beer or other carbonated beverages. 

  • A headmaster or headmistress. 

  • Denouement; crisis. 

  • The end cap of a cylindrically-shaped pressure vessel. 

  • A person with an extensive knowledge of hip hop. 

  • The end cap of a cask or other barrel. 

  • A buildup of fluid pressure, often quantified as pressure head. 

  • Leader; chief; mastermind. 

  • Fellatio or cunnilingus; oral sex. 

  • The cylinder head, a platform above the cylinders in an internal combustion engine, containing the valves and spark plugs. 

  • An individual person. 

  • The part of the body of an animal or human which contains the brain, mouth, and main sense organs. 

  • The bow of a vessel. 

  • A morpheme that determines the category of a compound or the word that determines the syntactic type of the phrase of which it is a member. 

  • The sharp end of an arrow, spear, or pointer. 

  • The difference in elevation between two points in a column of fluid, and the resulting pressure of the fluid at the lower point. 

  • The population of game. 

  • The principal melody or theme of a piece. 

  • A single animal. 

  • The place of honour, or of command; the most important or foremost position; the front. 

  • A headland. 

  • More generally, energy in a mass of fluid divided by its weight. 

verb
  • To be in command of. (See also head up.) 

  • To come at the beginning or front of; to commence. 

  • To form a head. 

  • To form a head to; to fit or furnish with a head. 

  • To strike with the head; as in soccer, to head the ball 

  • To go in front of. 

  • To get in the front of, so as to hinder or stop; to oppose. 

  • To move in a specified direction. 

  • To check or restrain. 

  • To remove the head from a fish. 

  • To originate; to spring; to have its course, as a river. 

  • To cut off the top of; to lop off. 

  • To set on the head. 

adj
  • Of, relating to, or intended for the head. 

  • Coming from in front. 

  • Placed at the top or the front. 

  • Foremost in rank or importance. 

tail

noun
  • The penis of a person or animal. 

  • All the last terms of a sequence, from some term on. 

  • A downy or feathery appendage of certain achens, formed of the permanent elongated style. 

  • Sexual intercourse. 

  • Synonym of pigtail (“a short length of twisted electrical wire”) 

  • A train or company of attendants; a retinue. 

  • The side of a coin not bearing the head; normally the side on which the monetary value of the coin is indicated; the reverse. 

  • A portion of an incision, at its beginning or end, which does not go through the whole thickness of the skin, and is more painful than a complete incision; called also tailing. 

  • The part of a distribution most distant from the mode; as, a long tail. 

  • A filamentous projection on the tornal section of each hind wing of certain butterflies. 

  • Limitation of inheritance to certain heirs. 

  • One of the strips at the end of a bandage formed by splitting the bandage one or more times. 

  • The feathers attached to the pygostyle of a bird. 

  • The back, last, lower, or inferior part of anything. 

  • A tailing. 

  • The caudal appendage of an animal that is attached to its posterior and near the anus. 

  • The distal tendon of a muscle. 

  • The bottom or lower portion of a member or part such as a slate or tile. 

  • One who surreptitiously follows another. 

  • The tail-end of an object, e.g. the rear of an aircraft's fuselage, containing the tailfin. 

  • The part of a note which runs perpendicularly upward or downward from the head; the stem. 

  • The lower order of batsmen in the batting order, usually specialist bowlers. 

  • The lower loop of the letters in the Roman alphabet, as in g, q or y. 

  • The rear structure of an aircraft, the empennage. 

  • The stern; the back of the kayak. 

  • The buttocks or backside. 

  • An object or part of an object resembling a tail in shape, such as the thongs on a cat-o'-nine-tails. 

  • The visible stream of dust and gases blown from a comet by the solar wind. 

  • A rope spliced to the strap of a block, by which it may be lashed to anything. 

  • The latter part of a time period or event, or (collectively) persons or objects represented in this part. 

adj
  • Limited; abridged; reduced; curtailed. 

verb
  • To hold by the end; said of a timber when it rests upon a wall or other support; with in or into 

  • To swing with the stern in a certain direction; said of a vessel at anchor. 

  • To follow and observe surreptitiously. 

  • To follow or hang to, like a tail; to be attached closely to, as that which can not be evaded. 

  • To pull or draw by the tail. 

How often have the words head and tail occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )