Flipping a coin dates back to the ancient Romans who knew it as “navia aut caput” (“ship or head“) because some coins had a ship on one side and the head of the emperor on the other.

So where did “tails” come from?

Some think it has to do with opposites. If “head” is one side of a coin, then “tails” should be the other.  Word historians know that the first recorded use of “tails” to mean the reverse side of a coin came in, “The Atheist,” a 17th century comedy written by Restoration playwright, Thomas Otway. Evidently, a character in the play tells another character that, “As boys do with their farthings … go to Heads or Tails for ’em.”

We’ll leave it to etymologists to figure out. We want to talk about “heading and tailing.”

Yes, it may be an antiquated term that comes to us from the world of fox hunting, but we’ve learned that many of NPDD readers are “breed history junkies,” and if you’re such a person who also owns a pack hunting breed, you might come across the phrase and wonder what it means.

A pack can have to 40 hounds (or 20 couples since in hunting terms,  hounds are always counted in pairs known as “couples”). Like people, they have their different strengths. Some hounds have better scenting abilities on grass, others on a gravel road, and so on. This applies to speed, as well. Some hounds are faster and some are slower, and the process of drafting them by their speed  (or lack of it) is called “heading and tailing.” Doing this achieves a measure of uniformity of pace among the hounds, and keeps the pace down instead of increasing it. In Tour de France terms (occurring as we write), hounds will “draft” at the head of the pack rather than the tail of it, particularly since a fox runs much faster than hounds. Hounds with greater speed and stamina will get to the fox first (though these days, scent is used on a fox hunt).

Image” “Hunting Horse With Rider Foxhounds” by Edwin Megargee (1883-1958)