tetracephalous

English

Etymology

tetra- +‎ -cephalous

Adjective

tetracephalous (not comparable)

1. Having four heads.

   After the squabbling children of the old company president could not decide who ought to succeed her, they settled on an uneasy tetracephalous leadership structure in which they all shared executive duties equally.

   • 1870, Albert Réville, translated by Ann Swane, History of the Doctrine of the Deity of Jesus Christ‎^[1], London: Williams and Norgate, page 106:

     But this idea of an abstract deity, existing independently of the three persons, was not accepted, and he was reproached with teaching the existence of four Gods. Peter the Lombard, at the end of his Sentences and Distinctions, found himself face to face with the same "tetracephalous monster," and Joachim of Flores bitterly reproached him for it.

   • 1940, Philip Babcock Gove, “Early numbers of The Morning Chronicle and Owen's Weekly Chronicle”, in The Library, volume 20, number 4, →DOI, page 414:

     This differs in one important respect from Nos. 284 and 493 : the centre device—of the same depth—in the title is what was once a tetracephalous dragon, perhaps apocalyptic, but now four-times decapitated.

   • 2012, A. B. Yehoshua, translated by Hillel Halkin, Five Seasons‎^[2], Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, →ISBN, page 65:

     He felt as if he were transporting a single, giant woman, a sleeping, shallowly breathing, tetracephalous female pudding whose separate heads kept banging against the windows, opening and shutting pairs of eyes until Haifa...

Synonyms

• quadricephalous

See also

• monocephalous
• bicephalous
• tricephalous
• pentacephalous