egghead
Americannoun
noun
Sensitive Note
This term is usually used with disparaging intent, implying that an intellectual is out-of-touch with ordinary people. Though first used by journalists to insult editorial writers, egghead was popularized as an epithet of Adlai Stevenson, the 1952 Democratic presidential candidate.
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Etymology
Origin of egghead
Explanation
An egghead is a smart, nerdy person. You might call your studious older brother, who always seems to have a book in his hand, an egghead. The word egghead is a very informal, slightly insulting name for an intellectual. College libraries are full of eggheads, academics who are researching and writing and thinking about their scholarly pursuits. The word originally meant "bald person," but it came to mean "smart person" in Chicago-area slang, particularly among newspaper reporters around 1918.
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Many seemed to regard Leibowitz as an interloping egghead.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 25, 2026
You don’t need to be an egghead to crack the Slate News Quiz.
From Slate ● Jul. 11, 2025
A professor who refused to be an ivory tower egghead, Brustein didn’t simply respond to the art of his day but helped shape it.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 8, 2023
Individual investors and savers, however, don’t need some economic egghead to give a recession an official stamp of approval.
From Seattle Times ● Aug. 13, 2022
Call me an egghead, but that's how I see it.
From "Me Talk Pretty One Day" by David Sedaris
What's a megastar to do when she has defined an entire summer, produced a multi-million-selling album and even persuaded the dictionary eggheads to declare "brat" a word of the year?
From Barron's ● Jan. 24, 2026
However, she says it soon transpired "they weren't quite the eggheads we thought they were".
From BBC ● Nov. 14, 2025
Which is a reminder even to the eggheads that no one has ever won the Ryder Cup on a spreadsheet.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 26, 2025
Levitan calls the phrase “a bit of down-home hucksterism designed to marginalize those eggheads over there who actually are scientists as somehow out of touch or silly.”
From Slate ● Nov. 29, 2018
“Didn’t you see the news yesterday? Some eggheads at Warwick College certified him as a genius with an IQ that’s off the charts!”
From "The Smartest Kid in the Universe" by Chris Grabenstein
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
