Stupid or lacking intelligence; having a thick skull or being slow to understand things.
Compound of 'fat' and 'head,' originating in 19th-century American English as a colloquial insult. The term uses 'fat' metaphorically to mean dull or sluggish, suggesting a thick, unresponsive mind rather than physical body weight.
This insult reveals how people once thought body size correlated with mental ability—'fat' became slang for sluggish thinking across many languages, but it's interesting that 'fatheaded' stuck around while most similar body-insults faded.
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