Word.ws English Dictionary

heads or harps

heads or harps noun: heads or tails.

heads or harps: heads or tails
Image: The government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

heads or harps (uncountable)

  1. (Ireland) heads or tails
    • A quarrel happened between two shoeblacks, who were playing at what in England is called pitch farthing, or heads and tails, and in Ireland, head or harp.1802, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Maria Edgeworth, “The Dublin Shoeblack”, in Essay on Irish Bulls, London: J. Johnson, page 128
    • ...he took out his purse, and, extracting half-a-crown, threw it up to the ceiling, saying,
      “Well, Dot—head or harp? If you’re right, you have them.”
      “Harp,” cried Dot.
      They both examined the coin. “They’re yours,” said Frank, with much solemnity...1848, Anthony Trollope, “XVI Brien Boru”, in The Kellys and the O'Kellys, volume II, London: Henry Colburne, page 55

Examples of heads or harps in a sentence

  • The head of the family had settled the amount of dowry he got with his wife by ‘heads or harps,’ and when he died he left his land to be tossed for by his two sons.John P. Frayne, editor (1970), Uncollected prose by W. B. Yeats, volume 1, Columbia University Press, →ISBN, page 28
  • Christina twirls on straps like a spinning coin that hasn’t decided if it will land on heads or harps.2019 September 16, Tom Swift, “Winging It”, in RTÉ Culture, RTÉ:

Forms of heads or harps

alternative formhead or harp

Origin of heads or harps

Copper coins minted in Georgian Ireland had the head of the British monarch on the obverse and the Irish harp on the reverse. The phrase "heads or harps" remained common even after 1823, when Irish minting ceased and only British coinage circulated; it was still current when the Irish Free State restored the harp on its newly introduced coins in 1927.

Questions about heads or harps

What does heads or harps mean?
Heads or harps means heads or tails.
How do you use heads or harps in a sentence?
The head of the family had settled the amount of dowry he got with his wife by ‘heads or harps,’ and when he died he left his land to be tossed for by his two sons.
What part of speech is heads or harps?
Heads or harps is a noun.

Words near heads or harps in the dictionary

  1. heads of the bills
  2. heads of the table
  3. Heads of the Valleys Road
  4. heads off
  5. heads off at the pass
  6. heads or harps
  7. heads or tails
  8. heads out
  9. heads south
  10. heads up
  11. heads up, seven up

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: heads or harps (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “heads or harps.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heads_or_harps. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.