head vs stem

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. 

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. 

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. 

stem

noun
  • The penis. 

  • A lesbian, chiefly African-American, exhibiting both stud and femme traits. 

  • A branch of a family. 

  • A component on a bicycle that connects the handlebars to the bicycle fork. 

  • A slender supporting member of an individual part of a plant such as a flower or a leaf; also, by analogy, the shaft of a feather. 

  • A premixed portion of a track for use in audio mastering and remixing. 

  • A person's leg. 

  • The vertical or nearly vertical forward extension of the keel, to which the forward ends of the planks or strakes are attached. 

  • A vertical stroke marking the length of a note in written music. 

  • A narrow part on certain man-made objects, such as a wine glass, a tobacco pipe, a spoon. 

  • A part of an anatomic structure considered without its possible branches or ramifications. 

  • A winder on a clock, watch, or similar mechanism. 

  • The stock of a family; a race or generation of progenitors. 

  • The above-ground stalk (technically axis) of a vascular plant, and certain anatomically similar, below-ground organs such as rhizomes, bulbs, tubers, and corms. 

  • A vertical stroke of a letter. 

  • A crack pipe; or the long, hollow portion of a similar pipe (i.e. meth pipe) resembling a crack pipe. 

  • The main part of an uninflected word to which affixes may be added to form inflections of the word. A stem often has a more fundamental root. Systematic conjugations and declensions derive from their stems. 

  • An advanced or leading position; the lookout. 

verb
  • To direct the stem (of a ship) against; to make headway against. 

  • To ram (clay, etc.) into a blasting hole. 

  • To move the feet apart and point the tips of the skis inward in order to slow down the speed or to facilitate a turn. 

  • To be caused or derived; to originate. 

  • To stop, hinder (for instance, a river or blood). 

  • To descend in a family line. 

  • To remove the stem from. 

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