nuthead

noun

1. A silly or crazy person; kook.

   “If she ever referred to the events, she laughed them off as silly kid stuff, and called the ex-boyfriend a nuthead, the way you speak of someone who drove around in high school smacking metal mailboxes with a baseball bat.”

   “As Joanne Hartzell, a longtime clinic administrator in a South Atlantic state, stated pithily in explaining why she does not worry, “We're a target with some, but there are nutheads out there everywhere.””

   ““The people at the British Museum told us afterwards,” Einarsson recalled, “that they get so many letters every day from nutheads! They considered us nutheads!””

2. A stupid person; fool; idiot.

   “Mum doesn't want a diamond ring out of a cracker, nuthead!”

   “Hey, I wasn't kidding myself that I was writing for a bunch of stupid little nutheads. I was writing for kids who could understand stuff as well as I could — at least, I felt they were that way.”

   “You called all of us nutheads. I can do that arithmetic as good as you can.”

3. Alternative form of nut-head.

   “When you are striping gears and come to a nuthead run right over it, with fine lines on its edges, or around the nut, as may be preferred.”

   “Model experiments have been made with two pairs of propellers, differing only in the fact that in one, excrescences representing nutheads were left on the boss.”

   “The steelworker is straddling the cross beam and is screwing on the nutheads by hand before finally tightening them with his wrench.”

   “When disconnecting or replacing clamp bolts, use only the correct size open-end wrench. Pliers should never be used for loosening or tightening nuts; they could round or otherwise damage the nutheads.”

4. Alternative form of nut-head.

   “Bend a paper clip into the shape of eyeglasses; glue them to the nuthead.”