table head

table head (plural table heads)

1. (dated) One of the short ends of a rectangular table, considered to be the most prominent place and often reserved for the host(s).

   Synonym: head of the table

   • 1606, Robert Rollock, Lectures vpon the First and Second Epistles of Pavl to the Thessalonians‎^[1], page 201:

     He that eates without labour (set him at the table head) he hes no honestie.

   • 1723, Jonathan Swift, “Stella at Wood-Park”, in The Works of Jonathan Swift‎^[2], volume 2, published 1744, page 153:

     Now at the Table-Head she sits, / Presented with the nicest Bits: She look’d on Partridges with Scorn, / Except they tasted of the Corn:

   • 1856, Charles Kingsley, “Perseus”, in The Heroes; or Greek Fairy Tales‎^[3], page 95:

     And when he came into the hall, Polydectes sat at the table-head, and all his nobles and landowners on either side, each according to his rank, feasting on the fish and the goat’s-flesh, and drinking the blood-red wine.

   • 1943, Graham Greene, chapter 2, in The Ministry of Fear‎^[4], page 184:

     Mrs. Bellairs began to choke, sitting grotesquely at the table-head; it was as if she had swallowed a fish-bone at a select dinner-party.

2. At a school, the senior pupil in charge of those assigned to a particular meal table; a similar position in other institutions.
   • 1965, A. C. V. B. Tetteh-Lartey, chapter 4, in The Schooldays of Shango Solomon‎^[5], page 33:

     A second bell interrupted the meal, and a prefect summoned the table-head to the prefects' table.

   • 2006, Tim Bascom, “Cinders”, in Chameleon Days. An American Boyhood in Ethiopia‎^[6], page 94:

     During dinner that first evening at Bingham Academy, I sat family-style with kids I didn’t know, all of them different ages. The oldest, a tight-faced teenage girl, announced that she was going to be our table head. She told me I was at the wrong chair.

3. (medicine) The end of an examining, operating or imaging table on which the patient’s head rests.
   • 1983, J. A. Morris, A Thumbnail Sketch of Theatre Nursing‎^[7], page 27:

     Check that the operating table is locked in position […] and that the handle for tipping the table head down (in case the patient vomits) is there and you know how it works.

   • 2002, Alan L. Williams and F. Reed Murtagh, chapter 6, in Handbook of Diagnostic and Therapeutic Spine Procedures‎^[8], page 121:

     If imaging of the entire thoracic subarachnoid space is not desired, the table head may be quickly brought back to the horizontal position […]