scarehead

plural scareheads

1. An alarming or sensational headline.

   1925, Sidney Coe Howard, They Knew What They Wanted (Doubleday, Page and Company), Act III, page 134. Joe sits on the porch rail outside the window perusing the scareheads of an I. W. W. paper.

   3 more examples

   If then he makes a scarehead of it, and gets in three columns of space and as many photographs, it is his just reward.

   1910, Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Window at the White Cat

   For sound reasons of literary structure, the Eta Bita Pies had their temporary setbacks, but over the closing scene there always rang out triumphantly that grand, old anthem: "Oh, you've got to be an Eta Bita Pie Or you won't get a scarehead when you die!"

   1952, The Beta Theta Pi, volume 79, number 2, page 271

   News, here, is what does not stay news, but is reified into undeviating headlines: the stilldamp neat row of boxes which in the paper's natural order had no scarehead, containing, since there was nothing new in them since time began, likewise no alarm: —that corssection out of timespace as though of a lightray caught by a speed lens for a seconds fraction between infinity and furious and trivial dust:

   2017, Julian Murphet, Faulkner's Media Romance, →ISBN, page 219

present singular third person scareheads · participle present scareheading · participle past scareheaded · past scareheaded · alternative scare-head

1. To write an alarming or sensational headline about.

   As soon as my dead body is found the newspapers will want to know why I did it. I'll tell them. And they may scarehead it as much as they like.

   1923, ???, “The Young Man Who Wanted to Die”, in Weird Tales^(https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Weird_Tales_v01n01_(1923-03).djvu/136), page 135