the.com/deadhead
A flower's funeral, a Grateful fan's faith, or a truck running empty home.
means To deadhead means to remove spent flowers from a plant to encourage new growth — though the word also names a vehicle running empty without cargo or passengers, and a devoted follower of the Grateful Dead.
from A plain compound of 'dead' and 'head,' assembled and reassembled for centuries to mean different empty or lifeless things. It first floated as a term for submerged logs and sunken timber — 'deadheads' that menaced riverboats. From there it drifted into theater and rail slang for someone admitted free (an empty seat that pays nothing) and for trains or trucks traveling without a load. Gardeners borrowed it for snipping off dead flower-heads. The Grateful Dead's faithful adopted 'Deadheads' as a badge of devotion in the 1970s, the band's name doing the heavy lifting.
- gardening
- Snipping spent blooms tricks plants into flowering again
- grateful fans
- Deadheads followed the band city to city for decades
- trucking term
- Hauling no cargo, burning fuel for zero pay
- aviation use
- Crew flying as passengers to reposition for duty
- logging slang
- A sunken log lurking just below the water
grateful dead tour followers — fans who followed the band across tours from 1965-1995, selling bootleg tapes and living on the road
phish summer tour — inspired by deadheads, phish fans camp and follow the band across multiple shows each summer since 1983