Airheaded

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Lacking intelligence or common sense; foolish and scatterbrained in behavior or thinking
2. Lacking mental sharpness or seriousness and often behaving in a way that is silly or thoughtless
3. Displaying a lack of mental focus and often acting without careful thought

Etymology: "Airheaded" is a plain compound: "air" plus "headed," the latter from "head" with the adjectival suffix "-ed." The pairing mirrors the older and more familiar "empty-headed," which uses the same picture of a mind imagined as a hollow vessel with nothing inside to weigh it down. Swapping "empty" for "air" keeps that image of a head containing only insubstantial gas rather than solid thought. The construction is a straightforward piece of English wordbuilding, so the interest lies in the metaphor rather than in any borrowed or ancient root. Readers should take the sense of "head" as the seat of thinking, a meaning the word has carried in English for centuries, and the sense of "air" as something light and without substance.

Synonyms: scatterbrained, forgetful, ditsy, unfocused, giddy

Antonyms: focused, clear-headed, serious, practical, sensible