Separated by a Common Language

When I was growing up in New York State, a beanie was a silly kind of skull cap, mostly worn by young people. My high school gave away felt ones like this (though with different letters). At the time, it was a very retro/jokey thing to wear.

The word beanie is originally an Americanism, derived from bean (also originally AmE), a slang term for 'head'. The OED entry for beanie was written in 1972 and has not been updated since. All its examples hint at felt hats—not necessarily silly ones like the one in the picture, but small hats worn toward the back of the head:

At some point after I moved to the UK in 2000, I started noticing British folk using beanie for what I had called a winter hat, others call a stocking cap, and Canadians (and some Americans) would call a toque (or tuque). It's a knit(ted) hat that might be rolled up at the bottom. Soon after that, I started noticing Americans using beanie (in) this way. So I was never sure where this use of beanie had originated. Nevertheless, it's definitely the predominant sense of the word now.

Google Image Search results for beanie

For some reason, I was thinking about beanies yesterday, and so I tweeted about them on Bluesky (yes, I'm reclaiming the word tweet). Monika Bednarek, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, replied that she thought the knit(ted) hat usage was Australian. Aha!

Now, I have no access to Australian dictionaries, and as we've seen, the OED is out of date on this. On top of that, there's no option to look at Australian sources only in Google Books ngrams. But Wikipedia says:

In New Zealand and Australia, the term "beanie" is normally applied to a knit cap known as a toque in Canada and parts of the US, but also may apply to the kind of skull cap historically worn by surf lifesavers and still worn during surf sports.

The lifesaver's beanie is much more like the silly American school cap. This photo comes from a National Post article about Australian lifesavers choosing (some years ago) to continue to wear the hat despite it being "uncool". 

But surfers seem to like to wear knit(ted) hats, so perhaps it was the association with surfing that transferred the meaning to the knit(ted) kind? Maybe? At any rate, it does look Australian in the 2013 Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

beanie in GloWbE

Since there are a lot of meanings of beanie (and use in proper names, like Beanie Baby), I checked again with kn* before beanie to capture knit(ted) beanies, and Australia still dominates:

kn* beanie in GloWbE

Now, whether the new use of beanie spread directly from Australia to both US and UK is another question. I suspect it probably travel(l)ed by many routes. Initially, it does look like the new use took off more quickly in the UK (around 2005), and it remains higher there.

But we don't know how many of those hits are about Beanie Babies or other uses of the word. So here it is again with knit or knitted before beanie. The difference in acceleration of the term is no longer evident, though BrE still uses it more than AmE.

The first ngram graph also shows beanie hat in greater numbers in the UK than in the US. This is also true in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English:

This falls into a pattern with goatee beard and chocolate brownie, where originally AmE words are sometimes two-word compounds in BrE, presumably because the addition of an 'old' word helps people to interpret the less-familiar word. 

So, an Americanism turned Australianism which was then populari{s/z}ed in US and UK. If English is any one thing, then it is a mutant.