A CADDY'S HEAD

The word caddy can describe either a type of small storage container or a golfing assistant; the definitions are unrelated. The former comes from catty, a unit of weight used by the British East India Company that came to be metonymically applied to the tea it measured (that originated from the kati unit used by Malay traders). The latter is an alternative spelling of caddie, which originally meant "person who runs errands" in general and was the Scottish spelling of French cadet (the source of English cadet, with the same meaning). Through a Gascon sense of "young member of a noble family", cadet traces to the Latin noun capitellam, or "little chief", and the root there is caput, meaning "head", because a chief is the head of a tribe. Finally, caput is from a Proto-Indo-European reconstruction also meaning "head", caput​.