Other forms: hats
A hat is what you wear on your head. A woolly hat, put a hat on, take your hat off.
Hats are named by shape or purpose: sun hat, bobble hat, top hat, hard hat. Take your hat off to somebody means to admire them. Wear two hats means to hold two roles at once, which is a very common workplace phrase. Note hat-trick, meaning three successes in a row, which comes from cricket, where a bowler taking three wickets in three balls was given a hat; and old hat, meaning outdated.
1nounhatSomething worn on the head.
“Put on a hat so you don't get sunburnt.”
hat is headwear.
Old English haett comes from a Germanic root meaning to cover or protect, the same root as hood and heed. The hat is named for what it does rather than for where it sits.
Proto-Indo-European
*kedʰ- — to guard, cover, care for, protect
Proto-Germanic
*hattuz — hat
Old English
hætt
Middle English
hat
English, today
hat
From Middle English hat, from Old English hætt, from Proto-Germanic hattuz (“hat”), perhaps from a late PIE root Proto-Indo-European kedʰ- (“to guard, cover, care for, protect”) or wanderwort. Cognate with frr and Danish hat (“hat”), Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk and Swedish hatt (“hat”), Icelandic hattur (“hat”), Finnish hattu (“hat”), Latin cassis (“helmet”), Lithuanian kudas (“bird's crest or tuft”), ae 𐬑𐬀𐬊𐬛𐬀 (“hat”), Persian خود (“helmet”), Welsh cadw (“to provide for, ensure”). Compare also hood. Verb sense 4 derives from a common English Wikipedia template used to collapse disruptive discussions, Hidden archive top, abbreviated as.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA