off one's head

Idioms and Phrases

Also, off one's nut or rocker or trolley or chump . Crazy, out of one's mind, as in You're off your head if you think I'll pay your debts , or I think Jerry's gone off his nut over that car , or When she said we had to sleep in the barn we thought she was off her rocker , or The old man's been off his trolley for at least a year . The expression using head is colloquial and dates from the mid-1800s, nut has been slang for “head” since the mid-1800s; rocker , dating from the late 1800s, may allude to an elderly person falling from a rocking chair; trolley , also dating from the late 1800s, may be explained by George Ade's use of it in Artie (1896): “Any one that's got his head full of the girl proposition's liable to go off his trolley at the first curve.” The last, chump , is also slang for “head” and was first recorded in 1859.

Related Words

• crazed
• delusional
• deranged
• unhinged