1639 J. Taylor Divers Crabtree Lect. 62 Thou a Poet? thou a Pot-head: your invention is never ripe, but when you have beene a potting and a piping.

1855 C. Kingsley Westward Ho! I. vii. 213 She was too good for a poor pot-head like me.

1867 G. W. Harris Sut Lovingood 35 Yu dad dratted ole pot-head, that's his Sunday shut.

1905 W. Baucke Where White Man Treads 150 This uncouth chunk of truculence inquired [in Maori]: ‘And who may this upoko kopua (pot head) be?’

1916 J. Joyce Portrait of Artist v. 290 Pothead!—Cranly said with calm contempt.

1960 J. B. Keane Sharon's Grave 75 Put me down, you thundering pothead!

1975 J. Gould Maine Lingo 217 Inland, a pot head is a citizen whose general intelligence suggests a chamber mug. A squash head.

1863 Islander (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island) 14 Aug. 2/3 Large numbers of Potheads are in the Bay, which probably accounts for the squid panic.

1954 Lethbridge (Alberta) Herald 22 Nov. 17/3 Pot-head whales sell for two cents a pound as fodder.

1969 F. Mowat Boat who wouldn't Float (1976) xii. 135 He grew ecstatic when we passed through a pod of pothead whales, sleek black beasts fifteen feet or more in length, so busy pursuing schools of unseen squid that some of them surfaced and blew within a stone's throw of us.

2002 S. Apollonio Hierarchical Perspectives on Marine Complexities iv. 60 The small, toothed whales variously called the pothead or pilot whale..are moderately abundant and notorious for occasionally committing suicide on the beaches of Cape Cod.

1901 W. J. Hopkins Telephone Lines (rev. ed.) ii. 38 (in figure) Pot head splice.

1903 London, Edinb., & Dublin Philos. Mag. 6th Ser. 5 327 The cables were brought out to pot-heads, and each wire terminated in a screw-cup.

1930 H. P. Seelye Electr. Distrib. Engin. xxvi. 497 The pothead usually consists of a cast-iron tank or pot into which the cable is inserted... The conductors pass through the pot and are either brought out through porcelain bushings, or are attached to conducting terminals fixed in the bushings. The pot is then filled with insulating compound.

1971 Syracuse (N.Y.) Herald-Jrnl. 28 June 21/5 The crews had worked for the past 162 hours following failure of a pothead which resulted in the shutdown of four generators.

2004 Contra Costa (Calif.) Times (Nexis) 17 Sept. f4 Specifically, the outage came after a failed ‘pothead’, Moreno said.

1957 J. Gelber Connection (1960) i. 38 And one of them turns out to be a pot-head.

1968 in A. Chapman New Black Voices 148 But if you ask me the dude aint' nothing but another pot head.

1974 Times Lit. Suppl. 1 Mar. 219/4 A girl..herself something of a pothead, who introduces Evans to the joys of the weed.

1989 J. Casey Spartina (1990) 53 I mean his pot-head college boys.

2003 Mojo May 63/2 People ask me where we're going and I look like some pothead because I don't know.