Green’s Dictionary of Slang

a fool; thus blunderheaded, foolish; also attrib.

1596		Nashe Have With You to Saffron-Walden in Works III (1883–4) 14: Two blockheads, two blunderkins, hauing their braines stuft with nought but balder-dash.
1669		R. L’Estrange Fables of Abstemius (1692) CCCVI 276: This Thick-skull’d Blunderhead.
1697		Vanbrugh Relapse IV i: My Fellow’s a Blunderhead.
1715		A. Ulrich Fifty Reasons or Motives 96: Nay, there is not that individual Man among them, tho’ he be never so great Blunder-head but makes himself his own Expositor.
1722		N. Lee Works 202: The Multitude is a mad thing, a strange blunder-headed Monster, and very unruly.
1734		Proc. at Large in the Arches Court of Canterbury 140: The said Mrs. Da Costa said, that he was a blunder-headed Fellow.
1760		Critical Rev. 10 452: The most rash, choleric, blunder-headed fellow, that ever was.
1760		G.S. Carey Innoculator 12: What a blunder-headed Puppy ’tis.
1815		D. Humphreys Yankey in England 55: You dunderhead! blunderhead!
1819		York Herald 9 Oct. 3/4: Since Blunderheads thus have distressed our nation, / OIh! cease with they cruel — thy vile declamation!
1828		N. Wales Chron. 2 Oct. 1/2: Then farewell to Bangor, dear ladies farewell, / Richard Blunderhead loves you but only too well.
1838		Dickens Oliver Twist (1966) 444: Why didn’t you, blunder-head?
1845		R.S. Surtees Hillingdon Hall I 173: The old Duke, like all blunder-headed men, being monstrously afraid lest his son should make mistakes.
1849		Edgefield Advertiser (SC) 6 June 1/6: He is the biggest blunderhad in the world.
1850		E.V. Kenealy Goethe: a New Pantomime in Poetical Works 2 (1878) 334: Blunder-head, Hunks, Cutthroat, Fumbler, / Jesuit, Lackbrain, Madman, Drone.
1853		Cheltenham Chron. 21 Apr. 2/3: He is the greatest blunderhead in the world.
1854		Worcs. Chron. 29 Mar. 8/4: I cannot believe, blunderheaded as our lawyers continually are, that they could enact a bill [etc.].
1865		Potter Jrnl (Coudersport, PA) 25 Jan. 1/4: He would have considerded it a disgrace to have been a blunderhead at anything.
1868		Dublin Eve. Mail 26 Aug. 2/5: Between descriptive writers and blunder-headed Welshmen the survivors are certainly being made to feel all the horrors of the calamity.
1879		Fayette Co. Herald (OH) 16 Jan. 1/6: In the well graded school the smart pupil gravitates to his proper place and the blockhead gravitates to his [...] in the ungraded school the blunderhad teacher will curb [the smart pupil] back in one place.
1884		W.C. Russell Jack’s Courtship I 113: I was not such a fop [...] nor such a blunderhead.
1899		Appeal (St Paul, Minn.) 10 Aug. 3/1: What does old Blunderhead do but detail me, as usual [...] It was just like old Jinglebrains.
1908		Gloucs. Chron. 19 Dec. 4/1: It was hoped that the Edcation Bill might restore the lost prestige, but blunder-headed methods ended [...] in total failure.
1910		Derbyshire Courier 9 Apr. 9/3: Fond mothers have been robbed of their babes because a few blunderheads wanted to save the rates!
1914		Day Book (Chicago) 27 May 18/2: He had stumbled over it in the exercise of that extraordinary ability of his to deserve the common nickname of Blunderhead. Danny was simply chronically irredemably clumsy.
1922		Aberdeen Jrnl 6 Apr. 5/7: You are a doomed man [...] Scortland Yard blunderheads will do as much for you as they did after Kilmichael .
1929		J.B. Priestley Good Companions 127: Eh, but I was a gert blunderhead!
1937		Bath Chron. 31 July 26/1: His series of bath caricatures [...] never never drew anything more droll than his view of old Blunderhead ‘footing it’ to the strains of the city musicians.
1989		H. Rawson Dict. of Invective (1991) 47: blunderhead. One who makes many mistakes or blunders.