Word.ws English Dictionary

head-case

head-case is the alternative spelling of headcase.

Meaning of headcase

Noun

headcase (countable and uncountable, plural headcases)

  1. (countable, derogatory, informal) A mentally unbalanced, unpredictable person, especially one who displays aggressive behavior.
    • "A stockbroker doesn't have 80,000 people sitting behind him just waiting for a mistake," says Jim Fassel, whom fans serenaded with "Fire Fassel!" chants during his final weeks as head coach of the New York Giants last season. "It can drive you crazy." From head coach to head case in three easy...2004 April 5, Sean Gregory, “Full-Court Stress”, in Time, archived from the original on 28 Oct 2010
  2. (uncountable) A genetic sequence that inhibits terminal branching of the trachea and regulates dendrite pruning.
    • Another gene downstream of EcR/Usp is headcase. Screening genes that show genetic interactions with EcR mutants, Loncle and Williams identified headcase as a regulator of dendrite pruning (Loncle and Williams 2012).2016, Kazuo Emoto, Rachel Wong, Eric Huang, Casper Hoogenraad, editors, Dendrites: Development and Disease, Springer, →ISBN, page 280
    Synonyms:
    hdc

Forms of head-case

pluralhead-cases

Questions about head-case

What is head-case the alternative spelling of?
Head-case is the alternative spelling of headcase.

Words near head-case in the dictionary

  1. head-butted
  2. head-butter
  3. head-butters
  4. head-butting
  5. head-butts
  6. head-case
  7. head-cases
  8. head-dress
  9. head-dresses
  10. head-emptier
  11. head-emptiers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: head-case (page history and authors); headcase (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “head-case.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/head-case. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.