I came accross the following つもりなど毛頭ない and I thought I should be able to read fur and head. But when I tried google it translated it as “didnt have the least intention”.
My question is is this an idiom, a saying or just a strange combination meaning intention.
Also are their any good resources with lists of common combinations that dont mean what youd think they mean?
毛頭 + negative-verb means “not the slightest, not in the least”. There’s no other meaning of the word, so I guess I wouldn’t really call it an idiom. One of Daijisen’s definitions for it is 毛の先ほども, which I guess is a gesture at why these kanji – the tip of a hair as a way of saying “a really tiny amount”, so with the negative verb it’s “not even a tiny amount”.
In your sentence, the “intention” is つもり.
PS: a useful tool for figuring this out is jisho.org (or equivalent): the entry for 毛頭 tells you this meaning.
Words not being guessable isnt an uncommon occurrence, so I don’t think any sort of list like that exists. It would be quite long and not something worth memorizing.
That and just focusing on vocabulary building essentially solves the problem. Takes as much effort to learn vocabulary from a random list as it does to learn vocabulary from a specific list, so OP I wouldn’t worry about it. Learn all the things!
Thank you. The tip of a hair explanation you gave puts it into context.
Thank you for taking the time to explain it and off some places to check out in the future.