Word.ws English Dictionary

headsmen

headsmen is the plural of headsman.

Meaning of headsman

Noun

headsman (plural headsmen)

  1. (Scotland, obsolete) A chief person; a head man
  2. An executioner whose method of dispatching the condemned is decapitation.
    • And of those base-minded jesters or buffons, some have beene seene, that even at the point of death would never leave their jesting and scoffing. He whom the heads-man threw off from the Gallowes cried out, ‘Row the Gally,’ which was his ordinarie by-word.1603, Michel de Montaigne, chapter 40, in John Florio, transl., The Essayes […], book I, London: […] Val[entine] Simmes for Edward Blount […], →OCLC
  3. (historical) A labourer in a colliery who transports the coal from the workings to the horseway, and who is oftentimes assisted by a younger worker called a foal.
  4. One in command of a whaling vessel.

Questions about headsmen

What is headsmen the plural of?
Headsmen is the plural of headsman.

Words near headsmen in the dictionary

  1. headsit
  2. headsits
  3. headslapper
  4. headslappers
  5. headsman
  6. headsmen
  7. headspace
  8. headspaced
  9. headspaces
  10. headspacing
  11. headspan

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: headsmen (page history and authors); headsman (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: “headsmen.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/headsmen. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.