headache beam
n.— «Each set of steel posts holds up another length of steel that spans Weber Street. Warning signs announce the height restriction. If the signs are ignored, trucks that are too tall will hit the steel and, the idea goes, stop before they collide with the formwork. And the name for the trusty crossbar? Engineers call it a “headache beam.”» —“His interest in world affairs never ‘flags’” by Christian Aagaard Kitchener-Waterloo Record (Ontario, Canada) Mar. 29, 1999. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...
The words tough, through, and dough all end in O-U-G-H. So why don’t they rhyme? A lively new book addresses the many quirks of English by explaining the history of words and phrases. And: have you ever been in a situation where a group makes...