Word.ws English Dictionary

head-final

head-final adjective: having the head (primary morpheme) at the end of a phrase.

Adjective

head-final (not comparable)

  1. Having the head (primary morpheme) at the end of a phrase.
    • A fascinating generalization across languages is that if a language has head-initial verb-object word order, then its head-argument word order rules tend to be head-initial, as in English and in lots of other subject-verb-object (SVO) languages such as Mandarin, Spanish, French, or Swahili. But if...2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Length Minimization as a Constraint on Grammars” (chapter 5), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 140

Questions about head-final

What does head-final mean?
Head-final means having the head (primary morpheme) at the end of a phrase.
What part of speech is head-final?
Head-final is an adjective.

Words near head-final in the dictionary

  1. head-dresses
  2. head-emptier
  3. head-emptiers
  4. head-ender
  5. head-enders
  6. head-final
  7. head-first
  8. head-game
  9. head-gamed
  10. head-games
  11. head-gaming

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: head-final (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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