Head or tail sound fine to my ESL ears. What's the reasoning behind the plural usage? I looked it up on etymonline but didn't find anything interesting.
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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 composite’. Other examples are dregs, thanks and remains. |
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Surprisingly, no one has mentioned about the metaphor here. (cf.Wikipedia, I suspect that it is properly called a metonymy.) In expressions like heads and tails, we really are not referring to the literal head or tail on a coin. The symbolism is merely a convenient way of referring to the obverse and reverse sides of the coin. We generally use the plural when a metaphor or a symbolism is used this way to refer to a certain class of associated things . So, this is not unique to heads and tails alone. |
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Heads (plural) seems to come from the variety of kings and queens heads on coins. Pluralising tails seems to purely be for consistency. |
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