Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
🔩 A square bolt 🚫 An offensive slur 🧓 An old-fashioned person
squarehead

squarehead

8.9
A person who is conventional and not willing to try new things
  • noun
  • /ˈskwɛrˌhɛd/
  • Offensive
translation icon : cuadrado
  • That big squarehead they've got now, my dad says he chaws up spikes and spits out rust.

Examples

  • Even though the project was innovative, his squarehead attitude held the team back.

  • The following day... being a hothead as well as a squarehead... Fritz took a potshot at Pierre.

    Victory Through Air Power (1943)

  • The fact that you even consider turning on Greece because of its problems, the fact that your super cool EU club is willing to let a member out in the cold so easily because it's no longer cool (wealthy enough) or doesn't have the shitty 'life is work' mentality that the squareheads have, is what's so fucking dead with the EU.

    Blog text (15)

  • My grandfather was a real squarehead who never embraced new ideas or trends.

  • In the meeting, his squarehead perspective made it difficult for others to express their creative solutions.

Synonyms

square
vssquarehead
  • Offensive
31 8.1

A person who is old-fashioned and not trendy

is used as a mild informal insult for such people

Antonyms

creative
772 3.3

Showing imagination to make art or new ideas

progressive
251 4.8

Supporting new social changes in politics to make society fairer

original
250 3.6

New and different, not copied from others

How Conventional

squarehead
  • Offensive
8.9
conventionalist
  • Formal
7.7
maverick
2 7.9

Surface Forms

squarehead singular
squareheads plural

Morphology

squarehead = square + head (semi-transparent) = square + head

Derived from 'square' meaning a conventional person; the compound is idiomatic, so its insulting nuance is not fully predictable from the parts for all learners.

Etymology

Squarehead meaning an unimaginative or old-fashioned person comes from square (used to mean 'not modern' or 'not cool') and head for a person, so calling someone a squarehead is a way to say they follow rules and avoid new things.