wrap one's head around
Formswraps one's head around, wrapping one's head around, wrapped one's head around
- 1To reach a clear understanding of something complicated or unfamiliar after some effort.
Like wrapping your arms fully around a big box: you have to take in the whole thing before you can get a grip on it.
It took the whole team weeks to wrap their heads around the new accounting system.
I still can't wrap my head around how she finished the race so fast.
Similargrasp, understand, comprehend, fathom
Note
The image is the mind stretching to enclose an idea. The possessive always matches the subject: I wrap my head around it, she wraps her head around it, they wrap their heads around it. The phrase tends to appear beside effort or failure (try and, couldn't), and it already appears in Science & Public Policy in 1978. Get one's head around means the same and swaps in freely.
- 2To crash violently and fatally into something, especially a pole, while driving a motor vehicle.
He wrapped his head around an oak tree doing ninety on the back road.
Three people wrapped their heads around a concrete barrier on the interstate last winter.
Similarcrash
Note
This is black humor from the road. The words are taken almost literally, picturing a head, or a whole car, folded around whatever it struck. It is uncommon and informal, and it is used of deaths, not mere fender-benders. David Adams Richards's The Coming of Winter (2011) catches its offhand roughness: "Some crazy young bastard wrapped his head around a pole." Because it shares its wording with the "understand" sense, only the object, a pole or tree rather than an idea, tells them apart.
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