Meanings
- uncountablemedicineAbnormal thickening of the skull, especially that produced by synostosis of the parietal bone with the occipital bone.
Like Chaucer's Miller, David Ritchie, the original of Scott's Black Dwarf, was an example of pachycephaly; i.e., he had the ability to run through doors with his hard skull.
1978, Jill Rubenstein, Sir Walter Scott: a reference guide, page 1052 more examples
The terms macro- and microcephalic are, in any case, quite generic, and simply indicate a morphological anomaly, which may include many widely different cases, such, for example, as rickets, hydrocephaly, pachycephaly, etc., all of which have in common the morphological characteristic of macrocephaly.
1913, Maria Montessori, Pedagogical Anthropology, page 244The Miller breaks doors with his head (lines 550-51). This claim is feasible, for several nineteenth- and twentieth-century men are know to have performed similar feats. Thus 'we may be sure that between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries stretched a long, thick-set line of heroes whose pachycephaly was exploited to stir the wonder and respect of their less gifted fellows' (p 419).
1990, Caroline D. Eckhardt, Dorothy E. Smith, Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: An Annotated Bibliography, page 383
Origin
Cite this entry
pachycephaly. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pachycephaly
“pachycephaly.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pachycephaly. Accessed November 3, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “pachycephaly,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/pachycephaly.
Source: pachycephaly on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.