ceann

head, so Irish, Old Irish cend, cenn, Welsh, Breton penn, Gaul, Penno-, *qenno. Perhaps for qen-no-, root qen (labialised), begin, Church Slavonic koni, beginning, as in ceud, first. The difficulty is that the other labialising languages and the Britonic branch otherwise show no trace of labialisation for qen. Windisch, followed by Brugmann, suggested a stem kvindo-, Indo-European root kvi, Sanskrit çvi, swell, Greek $$GPíndos, Pindus Mount; but the root vowel is not i, even granting the possible labialisation of kvi, which does not really take place in Greek. Hence ceannag, a bottle of hay, ceannaich, buy (="heading" or reckoning by the head; cf. Dial. ceann, sum up), ceannaich, head-wind (Hend.), ceannas, vaunting ( Hend.).