Word.ws English Dictionary

headedness

headedness noun: the state or quality of having a particular type of head (in various senses).

Noun

headedness (uncountable)

  1. (in-compounds) The state or quality of having a particular type of head (in various senses).
    • An analysis of the historical change that led to the development of second-position clitics in Old Bulgarian is proposed that implicates a switch in the parameter of headedness of TP.2005 February, Roumyana Pancheva, “The Rise and Fall of Second-Position Clitics”, in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory, volume 23, number 1, page 103
    • We can sometimes see evidence for a particular headedness direction among head-dependency pairs, in the form of a more compressed grammar.2025, Edward A. F. Gibson, “Dependency Grammar” (chapter 3), in Syntax: A Cognitive Approach, MIT Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 77

Origin of headedness

From headed + -ness.

Questions about headedness

What does headedness mean?
Headedness means the state or quality of having a particular type of head (in various senses).
What part of speech is headedness?
Headedness is a noun.

Words near headedness in the dictionary

  1. headed off at the pass
  2. headed out
  3. headed south
  4. headed up
  5. headedly
  6. headedness
  7. Headen
  8. headend
  9. headender
  10. headenders
  11. headends

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: headedness (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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