poll: [13] ‘Head’ is the original and central meaning of poll, from which all its modern uses have derived. The ‘voting’ sort of poll, for instance, which emerged in the 17th century, is etymologically a counting of ‘heads’, and the poll tax is a ‘per capita’ tax. The verb poll originally meant ‘cut someone’s hair’, a clear extension of the notion of ‘top’ or ‘head’ (the derived pollard [16] denotes an ‘animal with its horns removed’ or a ‘tree with its top branches cut off’); this later developed to ‘cut evenly across’, which is what the poll of deed poll means (originally it was a legal agreement cut evenly across, signifying that only one person was party to it – agreements made between two or more people were cut with a wavy line). => pollard
