a.
1. Headstrong.
1603. Florio, Montaigne, II. vi. 216. One of my men … mounted vpon a yong strong-headed horse.
1831. Carlyle, Sartor Res., II. iii. This young warmhearted, strongheaded and wrongheaded Herr Towgood.
1915. W. P. Livingstone, Mary Slessor, III. x. 83. They commiserated a Mother who was so strongheaded and wilful.
2. Endowed with strong intellectual faculties.
1849. Macaulay, Hist. Eng., vii. II. 222. Penn had never been a strongheaded man.
Hence Strongheadedness, obstinacy.
1793. Sir M. Eden, in Ld. Auckland’s Corr. (1862), III. 145. Their repeated losses were owing to their own strongheadedness in remaining scattered, against all advice, in small corps.
1862. Bagehot, Lit. Stud. (1895), II. 250. His case seems to have been the common one in which Nature (as we speak) requites itself for the strongheadedness of several generations by the weakness of one.
1880. Baring-Gould, Mehalah, xxi. (1884), 296. You will give way in the end—your weakness will yield to his strongheadedness.
