billycock
See also: billy-cock
English
editAlternative forms
editEtymology
editApparently an alteration of earlier bully-cocked.
Noun
editbillycock (plural billycocks)
- (dated) A felt hat with a rounded crown, similar to a bowler.
- 1911, GK Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown:
- a young man with a billycock hat on the back of his head tumbled up the steps in his eagerness.
- 1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, paperback edition, Vintage Classics, page 68:
- All this blazed up and showed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock hats [...].
- 1936, Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Faber & Faber, published 2007, page 56:
- 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 [...].
- 1978, Lawrence Durrell, Livia (Avignon Quintet), Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 372:
- the increasing paralysis confined her to this steel trolley, pushed by a gloved attendant dressed in a billycock hat and a long grey dustcoat.
References
edit- John Camden Hotten (1873) The Slang Dictionary