heading

UK/ˈhɛdɪŋ/US/ˈhɛdɪŋ/

nounB2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speech — head sits at #125neutral

Other forms: headings

A heading is the direction the bow is actually pointing. Hold this heading, change heading, a heading of two-seventy.

It is not the same as the course made good, since wind and tide push a vessel sideways. Keeping a heading and arriving where you meant are two different problems.

Definitions of heading

1nounheadingThe direction the bow is actually pointing.B2
“She held a steady heading through the night.”

heading is a direction.

Where it comes from

Middle English
heed
English
head
English, today
heading

Built from

*kap- · Proto-Indo-European — head; bowl, cup

From head + -ing. head comes from Middle English heed. From Middle English efd, had, hafd, heafd, hed, heed, hefet, heid, het, hevd, heved, hevid, hiede, hæfd, hæfedd, from Old English hēafod (“head; top; leader; origin”), from Proto-West Germanic haubud, from Proto-Germanic haubudą (“head”), from Proto-Indo-European káput (“head”), from kap- (“head; bowl, cup”). The modern word comes from Old English oblique stem hēafd-; the expected Modern English outcome for hēafod would be heaved (similar to the Middle English word). a doublet of cape and capo and caput and chef and chief and Howth*.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Sea & Sailing

Practise this word

heading in the wild

The course is to be distinguished from the heading, which is the direction where the watercraft's bow or the aircraft's nose is pointed.
Course (navigation)
MeSH was introduced in the 1960s, with the NLM's own index catalogue and the subject headings of the Quarterly Cumulative Index Medicus as precursors.
Medical Subject Headings
Since 1898, one of the most commonly used authority files globally is the subject headings from the Library of Congress.
Authority control
An attitude and heading reference system (AHRS) consists of sensors on three axes that provide attitude information for aircraft, including roll, pitch, and yaw.
Attitude and heading reference system
A set of attributes in which no two distinct elements have the same name is called a heading.
Relation (database)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

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