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overhead

adjectivenounadverbprepositionnouncommon in dialogue

  • //ˈəʊvəˌhɛd//
  • //ˈoʊvɚˌhɛd//

Located above, especially over the head.

adjective

  1. 1

    Located above, especially over the head.

    Place your luggage in the overhead lockers.

    The railway consists of some 18 miles of double track electrified on the overhead principle.

    In a city where media companies and hospitals have armed guards, this accessibility is unusual. Inside, drivers sit and chat in between shifts, the overhead fan whirring and causing the dim electric light to flicker over their faces.

  2. 2

    Kicked over one's own head.

    It was Rooney, however, who produced a moment of inspiration to score a stunning overhead kick that will live forever in the memory of United's fans and extended City's dismal sequence of only one league win in their last 27 visits to Old Trafford.

Etymology

From Middle English owerheved, over-hed, over hede (adverb), from Old English oferhēafod (adverb), equivalent to over- + head. Compare German Low German overhoopt, överhoopt, German überhaupt. Piecewise doublet of overchief.

noun

  1. 1

    The expense of a business not directly assigned to goods or services provided.

  2. 2

    The items or classes of expense not directly assigned to goods or services provided.

  3. 3

    Any cost or expenditure (monetary, time, effort or otherwise) incurred in a project or activity, which does not directly contribute to its progress or outcome.

  4. 4

    Wasted money.

  5. 5

    A smash.

  6. 6

    The ceiling of any enclosed space below decks in a vessel.

  7. 7

    A compartment above the seats for stowing luggage in a passenger aircraft.

    There was no room left in the overheads for our luggage, our seats did not recline, and the washrooms were right behind us.

  8. 8

    The system of overhead wires used to power electric transport, such as streetcars, trains, or buses.

  9. 9

    Data or steps of computation used only to facilitate the computations in the system and not directly related to the actual program code or data being processed.

    Network overhead is the header data that is required to route and transport data over the network, whereas fork overhead is the additional time and memory cost of creating and managing new processes within the operating system.

  10. 10

    An overhead throw.

  11. 11

    A type of bridge, also commonly known as an overpass or flyover, which carries one form of traffic over another.

adverb

  1. 1

    Above one's head; in the sky.

    birds flying overhead

    Now we plunged into a deep shade with the boughs lacing each other overhead, and crossed dainty, rustic bridges over the cold trout-streams, the boards giving back the clatter of our horses' feet: or anon we shot into a clearing, with a colored glimpse of the lake and its curving shore far below us.

  2. 2

    archaicPer head; for each individual.

preposition

  1. 1

    Above.

    Cigarette smoke was sucked out through the cracks in the glass of the glazed panes overhead the side street and the parking lot.

noun

  1. 1

    An overhead projector.

  2. 2

    A sheet of transparent material with an image used with an overhead projector; an overhead transparency.

Etymology

(Sense 1) Abbreviation of overhead projector. : (Sense 2) Back-formation from overhead projector.

Forms

plural
overheads
comparative
more overhead
superlative
most overhead
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).