Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A felt hat with a low, rounded crown, similar to a derby.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A stiff, round, low-crowned felt hat: often called a billycock hat. Also spelled billicock.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • A round, low-crowned felt hat; a wideawake.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun dated A felt hat with a rounded crown, similar to a bowler.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Perhaps from earlier bullycocked, cocked in the fashion of a swashbuckler : bully, gallant figure + cock.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Apparently an alteration of earlier bully-cocked.

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Examples

  • A billycock is a beautiful object (it may be eagerly urged), but it is not in the same style of architecture as Ely Cathedral; it is a dome, a small rococo dome in the Renaissance manner, and does not go with the pointed arches that assault heaven like spears.

    Alarms and Discursions 1905

  • The shopwoman produced a head-dress, which Tottie afterwards described as a billycock 'at with a feather in it.

    Post Haste 1859

  • Some ribald passer-by put a battered felt hat upon Vishnu's sacred curls, and there the poor image sat, an alien in an indifferent land, a sack across its shoulders, a "billycock" upon its head, and honoured at most with a passing stare.

    Gulliver of Mars 1905

  • Some ribald passer-by put a battered felt hat upon Vishnu's sacred curls, and there the poor image sat, an alien in an indifferent land, a sack across its shoulders, a "billycock" upon its head, and honoured at most with a passing stare.

    Gulliver of Mars Edwin Lester Linden Arnold 1896

  • The women affect parti-coloured petticoats of home-made baize or woollen stuff, dyed blue, scarlet, brown, or orange; a scalloped cape of the same material bound with some contrasting hue; and a white or coloured head-kerchief, sometimes topped by the _carapuça_, but rarely by the vulgar 'billycock' of the Canaries.

    To the Gold Coast for Gold A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Volume I Richard Francis Burton 1855

  • I beg that you will look upon it not as a battered billycock but as an intellectual problem.

    Sole Music 2010

  • I had a week at most at my disposal, so for three or four nights I set off stealthily after dark, dressed in an ancient pea jacket and patched unmentionables, with a muffler and billycock hat and cracked boots, Galand in one pocket and flask in t'other, skulking round Conduit Street to see what his movements were.

    Watershed 2010

  • I said I had a ship, and a greasy disease in a billycock hat and brass watch-chain asked:

    THE NUMBERS 2010

  • Despising this latter sort of thing is not despising Mr. Wells, but only some cheap atheist in a billycock hat whom he had the bad luck to meet when he was a boy.

    G.K.'s Weekly - On Mr. Wells and Mr. Belloc 2007

  • Then on the heels of this procession came a dogcart driven by a man in a billycock hat and containing a lady in dark green.

    The Wheels of Chance: a bicycling idyll Herbert George 2006

Comments

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  • "... fawn dustcoat on his arm, tawny red brogues, fieldglasses in bandolier and a grey billycock hat."

    Jayce, Ulysses, 15

    January 29, 2007

  • . . . the grandmother who, for some unknown reason, was dressed as a man, wearing a billycock and a corked moustache, ridiculous and plump in tight trousers and a red waistcoat . . .

    —Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

    November 19, 2008

  • There should be a list of hats that remind us of bilby. I'd add this and trilby.

    October 28, 2015