The word “noggin” has a longer history than you might expect for a slang term for your head. When the word is used today, it’s used the way it appeared in Landfall in 1951: “Thanks, chum,’ said Vic, ‘You used your noggin.’” Roald Dahl used it, too, in The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: “Of course I can get ‘er. I’ll drill a ‘ole right through ‘er noggin!”
That’s how it’s used in the US, at least. In England, it’s occasionally still found connected to an older meaning, as a small alcoholic drink: “You can leave him in the Landrover whilst you have a noggin in the pub.” That’s from 1999.
The oldest meaning of “noggin”, though, dates from the 1500s, when it meant a cup or mug: “Item iij cans iij pickens iij noggens iij bottells iij gallons and one skyle.” That bit is from an inventory in someone’s will from 1588.
“Noggin” has been around for centuries, starting out as an ordinary word for something you drink from, shifting to that stuff you drink that makes you lightheaded, then eventually shiftingagain to a slang term that means your head itself. For a short period in the mid to late 1800s, “noggin” was used to mean a small bucket, too — evidently only in the US.
Nobody knows where the word originally came from. There are similar words in Gaelic (“noigean”) and Irish (“noigin”), but it turns out those are derived from English rather than the other way around. Today’s sense of “noggin” as your head seems to come from boxing, originating in the 1700s. In 1769 the Stratford Jubilee published this account from a boxer: “Giving him a stouter on the noggin, I laid him as flat as a flaunder.” It kept its association with a head that’s just been clobbered into the early 1900s: “She smacks Rusty Charley on the side of the noggin with the bat,” (Guys and Dolls, 1932), but by midcentury it lost the connotation and just meant head in general. Which is how you’ve probably heard it — if you’ve heard it at all. It’s still relatively common for a slang term, but overall its usage is rated as “moderately infrequent.”
If you lived outside the US, though, and happened to work in the building trades, you might know a “noggin” as something else altogether: the horizontal timbers you use when building something like a wall. Before the walls are encased in sheetrock, of course, the tradesmen have to be careful walking around the place; you could smack your noggin on one of those noggins, and then you’d need a noggin.
