billycock

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   dated British: a stiff felt hat with a rounded crown, similar to a bowler hat

   The messenger pushed his battered billycock to the back of his head.

An alteration of the earlier nineteenth-century form bully-cocked, used of a hat whose brim was cocked or turned up in a bold style. Billycock later settled on the rounded felt hat now usually called a bowler in Britain or a derby in the United States.

Topics