This week’s theme
Words with double lives

This week’s words
automania
airhead

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A.Word.A.Day

PRONUNCIATION:

(AIR-hed)

MEANING:

noun:
1. An area in a hostile territory, secured for bringing in supplies and personnel by air.
2. A silly or unintelligent person.
3. A horizontal channel created to provide ventilation in a mine.

ETYMOLOGY:

For 1: From air + beachhead. Earliest documented use: 1943. Also see bridgehead.
For 2: From the metaphorical notion that a person’s head contains only air. Earliest documented use: 1971.
For 3: From air + head (source of a channel). Earliest documented use: 1817.

USAGE:

“As the Allied armies advanced east, the Dakotas landed at recently captured German airfields and finally at Brussels, which became a major airhead.”
Ken Cranefield: Pilot Badly Wounded Dropping Supplies Over Arnhem in 1944; The Daily Telegraph (London, UK); Oct 19, 2016.

“Jeff Spicoli, the surfing-obsessed truant ... may have been an airhead, but he had a vocabulary. Things he enjoyed were ‘gnarly’ or ‘humongous’.”
Glenn Kenny; The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe; The New York Times; Aug 16, 2024.

See more usage examples of airhead in Vocabulary.com’s dictionary.

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY: