Piston engines are typically arranged with their pistons in rows, moving inside individual cylinders. This allows the engine block to be built from a single piece of metal, which is machined. Engines often have more than one row of pistons, each with their own block, and these are referred to as cylinder banks.
Note that not all engines have cylinder banks. Radial engines have each piston in a separate cylinder, and this was common in earlier in-line engine designs as well.
Internally the cylinder head has passages for the fuel/air mixture to travel to the inlet valves from the intake manifold, for exhaust gases to travel from the exhaust valves to the exhaust manifold, and for antifreeze (coolant) to cool the head and engine.
A V engine usually has two cylinder heads, one at each end of the V, although Volkswagen, for instance, has recently produced a V6 where the angle between the cylinderbanks is so narrow that it utilizes a single head.
The cylinder head is key to the performance of the internal combustion engine, as the shape of the combustion chamber, inlet passages and ports (and to a lesser extent the exhaust) determines a major portion of the volumetric efficiency and compression ratio of the engine.
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