pachycephaly

English

Etymology

pachy- +‎ -cephaly

Noun

pachycephaly (uncountable)

1. (medicine) Abnormal thickening of the skull, especially that produced by synostosis of the parietal bone with the occipital bone.
   • 1913, Maria Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology, page 244:

     The terms macro- and microcephalic are, in any case, quite generic, and simply indicate a morphological anomaly, which may include many widely different cases, such, for example, as rickets, hydrocephaly, pachycephaly, etc., all of which have in commone the morphological characteristic of macrocephaly.

   • 1978, Jill Rubenstein, Sir Walter Scott: a reference guide, page 105:

     Like Chaucer's Miller, David Ritchie, the original of Scott's Black Dwarf, was an example of pachycephaly; i.e., he had the ability to run through doors with his hard skull.

   • 1990, Caroline D. Eckhardt, Dorothy E. Smith, Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: An Annotated Bibliography, page 383:

     The Miller breaks doors with his head (lines 550-51). This claim is feasible, for several nineteenth- and twentieth-century men are know to have performed similar feats. Thus 'we may be sure that between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries stretched a long, thick-set line of heroes whose pachycephaly was exploited to stir the wonder and respect of their less gifted fellows' (p 419).

See also

• hardheadedness, thickheadedness (figurative; not to be confused)