🎸 Grateful Dead fan 🌸 To remove flowers 🚆 Empty vehicle trip 😴 Unproductive person 🌸 Flower remover

deadhead

1 8.9

A vehicle like a bus or taxi that travels empty to pick up passengers

noun
/ˈdɛdˌhɛd/

Jargon

: viaje en vacío

Pancho figured that something important was waiting for them when they landed, something important enough for Astro to undergo the expense of letting them ride deadhead from Selene.

Examples

The trucking company schedules their deadhead routes to minimize empty travel between jobs.
Are you my deadhead to Miami?

Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Are you my deadhead?

Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Usually I’d take it out on the deadhead side of a paying trip, but today I’m happy to do the trip for nothing and let Bertran pay for the gas.

Fiction book (1997)
Electric means no wasted deadhead runs to refuel, no warm-up time on cold mornings (crew gets there 30 to 45 minutes early just to start loco engines and warm them up at idle).

Blog text (5)
The bus will travel as a deadhead back to the station after dropping off the passengers.
During the road trip, we needed a deadhead taxi to bring us back to our original location.

How Full

load

278 1.1

light

1 2.1

deadhead

Jargon

1 8.9

Surface Forms

deadhead singular

deadheads plural

Morphology

deadhead = dead + head (opaque) = dead + head

The industry-specific sense 'an empty vehicle' is not directly inferable by a B1 learner from 'dead' + 'head'; it is jargon.

Etymology

Deadhead comes from the idea of dead ('not carrying') and head ('going somewhere'): it named a train, bus, or taxi that travels empty to pick up passengers. So a deadhead trip is one that has no paying people on board.