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The term is heads or tails in America or Britain but it differs in other countries based on their monetary history. I know that Italy has Heads or Crosses and back in the Roman days there was Heads or Ships. Heads is a given. Most coins have a picture of a leader or powerful figure on one side and the opposite side whatever.
The Oxford English Dictionary has one citation from 1801 which puts it in the singular, but the earliest citation, from 1684, has ‘heads or tails’. I think we must regard heads and tails,when found in this context, as examples of ‘pluralia tantum’, the term used to describe nouns that end in -s, but whose meaning is ‘collective or ...
Personally I think heads and tails above [the competition is a kind of "eggcorn" misunderstanding / mishearing of the idiomatic standard head and shoulders above. Certainly the former has almost no currency by comparison... The standard version makes sense - literally or figuratively "shorter" ones don't even reach as high as the "taller" one's ...
After all, the normal-sounding wording "two heads and two tails" doesn't add a plural ending to the singular ending "heads" or "tails" that we use to describe the result of a single flip. The answer here, I believe, is that the description of multiple coin flip results isn't a progression from singular to plural "heads" or "tails" at all.
Heads or Tails is a coin-tossing game. Most coins have a side where the imprint of a person, such as a current or former head of state, is impressed — this side is called the “heads” side (since the embossing is of the head of a person).
The obverse of a coin is commonly called heads, because it often depicts the head of a prominent person, and the reverse tails. In fields of scholarship outside numismatics, the term front is more commonly used than obverse, while usage of reverse is widespread.
They couldn't make heads or tails of it until they flipped it over to read the instructions. not make head or/nor tail of (idiom) variants: or US not make heads or/nor tails (out) of. informal. To be unable to understand (something) I couldn't make heads or tails of her reaction. His handwriting was so bad that we couldn't make heads or tails ...
1. Correcting my previous comment: The preferred usage is for the noun following "everyone's" to be singular, unless each person is meant to have more than one of the noun. So "everyone's head" (since each person has one head); but "everyone's lips" (since each person has two lips), and "everyone's bank acounts" (if each person has more than ...
Antecedents of "cooler heads prevailed" go back at least to the early 1800s. For example, in a speech by the chancellor of the exchequer in connection with allegations of corruption involving the Duke of York, from " British and Foreign History for the Year 1809," chapter 2, in The New Annual Register, Or General Repository of History (July 1810):
If you just want a phrase, the above answers are good. If you want to teach your children about chance and odds, I would simply use a quarter, and show them all the sides: heads, tails, and side. Teach them heads and tails until they understand a 50-50 chance or equal chance. Then tell them how chance is related to odds (easy enough; it's ...