Abstract: This paper aims to give a description of the diachronic development and synchronic distribution of tóu and shǒu (viz.＂head＂ in the Swadesh lists) in Chinese. The description mainly deals with the sounds, forms, meanings and parts of speech of a couple of corresponding core items and their syntagmatic features, as well as paradigmatic relations, historical development and dialectal distributions of the members of related semantic field, followed by a brief summary. It is argued that, for the meaning of＂head＂, two replacements has taken place in the history of Chinese: yuán“( 元”) by shǒu“( 首”) and, in turn, shǒu by tóu“( 头”). The former replacement was completed by the early Old Chinese period, while the latter one around late West Han Dynasty. In modern Chinese dialects, there are mainly two groups of items centering around tóu and nǎo“( 脑”) for the meaning of＂head＂. It is found out that among about over a half dialectal points, tóu is used, covering the ten dialectal areas. Of the group centering around nǎo, nǎo ké“( 脑 壳”) and nǎo dài (guā / guā zi)“( 脑袋”(瓜/瓜子) are most widely used, then followed by nǎo. However, the single item shǒu is not found in use in all the areas, and is even rarely used in disyllabic items as a morphological remnant. Such a change is identified as representing one of the typical patterns of the historical development of Chinese basic vocabulary items, i.e., old items are completely replaced by new ones, practically in a one-to-one way. It is the author's proposal that the replacement of shǒu by tóu is probably motivated by homonymic competition, and the rise of the nǎo-based group is relatively late, even though nǎo already meant＂head＂as early as West Han Dynasty. It is argued that although many multi-syllabic items of the group come into use since the Jin-Yuan Dynasties, there is a tendency that they are gradually replacing tóu.