Continuous pain or aching sensations in the head; also used figuratively to mean something that causes worry or trouble.
A compound of 'head' and 'ache,' where both words are Old English. The literal medical meaning emerged early, and the figurative meaning developed as people compared emotional distress to physical pain.
'Headache' is one of the most productive metaphors in English—we say annoying things 'give us a headache' because our brains instinctively link thinking hard to head pain, so problems become literally headache-inducing in our language.
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