Bald means having no hair on your head. A shaved head, a shiny crown with a ring of hair round the sides, a man who starts going bald at twenty-five and decides to take the rest off himself.
Going bald is the phrase for the process and balding is the adjective for a man halfway through it. It reaches past heads: a bald tyre has worn smooth with no tread left, and a bald patch is any place where the cover has gone — a lawn, a carpet, a hillside. A third sense has nothing to do with hair at all: a bald statement or the bald truth is one delivered plain, with nothing softening it. Bald eagles are not bald, by the way — the name comes from an older sense of the word meaning white-headed. The noun is baldness.
1adjectivebaldHaving no hair on the head.
“He was completely bald by the age of thirty.”
synonyms: hairless
2adjectivewornWorn smooth, with the surface or covering gone.
“Two of the tyres were bald and the car failed its test.”
3adjectiveplainPlain and blunt, with nothing added to soften it.
“The bald truth is that the money has run out.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
Nobody has settled where bald came from. Middle English had balled and ballid, and the leading guess ties it to bal or balle — a ball, a round thing, a head — so that a bald head is a head like a ball. A rival explanation reaches instead for old words meaning a white patch on the forehead.
Middle English
balled
English, today
bald
Built from
From Middle English balled, from bal. From Middle English balled, ballid, bald (“bald”), of unknown origin. Probably formed from Middle English bal, balle (“ball, round object, knoll, head”). Compare gmq-oda bældet (“bald”). An alternate etymology relates it to Old English bǣl (“fire, flame; funeral pyre”), from Proto-Germanic bēlą. Compare Albanian balë (“white spot on the forehead”) and ballë (“forehead”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA