Other forms: knuckleheads
A knucklehead is someone who is a dunce or does something foolish. You might criticize your friend's baking skills by saying, "You used salt instead of sugar, you knucklehead!"
Knucklehead is an informal term that can come across as joking rather than insulting, depending how you use it. A pair of brothers might call each other knuckleheads in a fond way: "Hang on, I'm coming with you on your bike ride, you knucklehead!" The word is uniquely American, coined in the late nineteenth century, but made popular in the 1940s by an Army recruitment character known as "R. F. Knucklehead."