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Now, I have no access to Australian dictionaries, and as we've seen, the OED is out of date on this.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:
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| 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:
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| 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.
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.
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ReplyDeleteI sometimes refer to the contemporary headgear as a "watch cap" which is a (U. S.?) Navy term. It is generally understood when I use the term. It seems to be more specific to the knitted warmth type than the other types. My youth was stocking cap or sock cap for watch cap but that seems to have diminished over the decades.
ReplyDeleteWatch cap used to be the common term in the US. Beanie seems very recent as in just the past couple of years. I wonder if old LL Bean and Eddie Baur catalogs would tell the story of the transition.
DeleteI grew up calling them woolly 'ats (note the dropped "h"!), but they are beanies now. My mother calls them "fonny 'ats", though why she mispronounces "funny" in this, and only this, context is beyond me!
ReplyDeleteWe don’t wear them much in central Texas, but I agree that I was surprised when I first heard beanie from a teenage student around 2007. It would be stocking cap, winter hat or knit cap for me. A beanie needs a propeller on top.
ReplyDeleteI associate the term beanie with the propeller beanie, a hat with a small propeller on the crown, for a while popular with science fiction fans. Wikipedia claims it was invented in 1947. I bought what was called a propeller beanie many many years ago at an SF convention in America, only it was a baseball cap, with a peak.
ReplyDeleteHere in Canada (southwestern Ontario, more precisely) a beanie to me always meant those hats with propellers -- which I can see is a variation of the kind of felt beanies described at the top of the post, but I never saw them sans propeller. Here, "hat" pretty much means the ribbed, knitted variety, as soon as the weather cools off -- but I would also say tuque or just winter hat. I'm hearing beanie more and more often here.
ReplyDeleteAs a knitter, I thought it would be interesting to look at hat names in Ravelry (website that includes a massive database of knitting patterns). I filtered a pattern search to only show knitted hats in either the "beanie/toque" category or the "stocking cap" category, with patterns in English. Stocking cap seems largely to refer to triangular hats (think Santa or an old-fashioned man's nightcap). For the rest, the vast majority just have "hat" in the name. There's no way to download the results and I don't have time for a full count, as there are over 72000 matches, but out of the top 100 most popular patterns, I counted 60 with the word "hat" in the pattern name, 8 with the word "beanie" (including one "beanie hat"), 1 "watch cap", and 1 "toque". The rest of the patterns either didn't have a hat word in the title at all, or used a term from another language in the title. Now, are some of those most popular patterns in that category precisely because they have the generic "hat" word in their titles and they're easily searchable? Possibly!
The Alice Springs Beanie Festival in Central Australia has been going since 1997.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.beaniefest.org/
So beanies were hats (crocheted or knitted) here well before that date.
I've never seen anyone wearing a beanie with a propeller on top, but I know it's the origin of "propellerhead": a person with an obsessive interest in technology. Merriam-Webster has it from 1982, "from cartoon images of science fiction fans wearing caps with a propeller protruding from the top."
ReplyDeleteI think we (California) called the knitted versions "ski caps" until relatively recently, when they became "beanies."
As an Australian, I didn't know there was any other meaning of the word 'beanie', aside from knitted hat. I can't think of a time when I used any other word to describe them, although of course they weren't a huge part of my life, as not really needed in winter where I live. But I would be at least 75% confident that I was using the term in the early 1980s - I seem to remember buying one for a high school trip to the snow.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't tell you the year exactly, but late 00's I think was the first time I'd (North of England after Wales) heard Beanie as a hat. (I don't know about Beanie Babies.) I was working with someone from Ohio who talked about wearing a beanie and I was, relatively politely (he was a client who was paying me quite a lot for some work) "Dude, wtf is a beanie?" About a decade earlier I'd had the same reaction to toque, although that was because my parents had moved to Canada and I heard it in relation to a knitted cap, I'd only heard it applied to a chef's toque before.
ReplyDeleteBut these days, beanie seems ubiquitous in the UK.
I grew up (North Carolina) calling the knitted cap a toboggan.
ReplyDeleteAs an Australian a Beanie has always been with a knitted hat for as long as I can remember. They used to traditionally all all have pompoms but more modern ones do not.
ReplyDeleteI have never heard of a surf lifesavers cap called a beanie, it was always just called a 'cap'.
Ditto. I grew up adjacent to the Snowy Mountains, so the word beanie to refer to the knitted cap (with or without pompom) entered my life very early. I would say in the early 1960s.
DeleteAlso never heard of the surf lifesavers yellow and red caps being referred to as anything but a cap.
I grew up in the UK and the nineties were my teenage years, so I suppose I would have been in the most "linguistically impressionable" age group just before you arrived here!
ReplyDeleteMy subjective recollection is that "beanie" was certainly a widely-known term at that time, but was viewed as an Americanism (whether or not it actually was!). The more natural term would have been a "woolly hat" (or "bobble hat" if it had a bobble). I'd view the terms as interchangeable, but I think there was perhaps a slight difference of semantic emphasis. I think my initial reference for a "beanie", which somewhat persists, is that an ur-beanie is one of those tall, stovepipe versions, where there seems to be a cavity above the wearer's head, and that more head-hugging variants are beanies in a looser sense. I don't have the same distinction for "woolly hat".
That may be a very time-period-specific, imported-fashion-based effect!
I'm 30 years older than Popeye and had only a vague idea that a beanie was 'some kind of hat', but I too would call the knitted one a 'woolly hat' or 'bobble hat'.
ReplyDeleteMy experience living in the US Midwest and South is that when "beanie" was first used for a knit hat around ten or fifteen years ago it was just for a specific kind of knit hat that didn't have enough fabrichttps://celticclothing.com/product/irish-wool-beanie-hat-charcoal-gray/ to fold over, like here.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure people make this distinction anymore.
US, coastal New England, in my 70s. Watch cap is the term I grew up with; I believe it’s a maritime term. I’ve heard them called beanies, but to me, those are caps like the one in your picture.
ReplyDeleteI grew up on the East Coast and first heard "beanie" in 2004 from a Californian who, come to think of it, was a surfer. Any chance it came to the United States that way, via Australian surfer culture?
ReplyDeleteOh, is THAT what a toque is. I had the vague impression of something like a 1950s/60s pillbox hat only smaller.
ReplyDeleteAs others have mentioned I grew up calling beanies, woolly hats or bobble hats if they had a bobble on. I only really became aware of them being called beanies in the last couple of years.
I’m 42, grew up in south eastern England. I had always thought beanie was an Americanism - shows how much I know! It's a word I have pretty much always known and understood, not sure how much I've used it though. I'd just say woolly hat, or bobble hat if it has a bobble.
ReplyDeleteThinking about it a bit more, beanie has a bit of an implication for me of a hat worn for fashion, whereas if it's worn to keep you warm it's a woolly hat. That's not an absolute rule though and I wouldn't be surprised to hear either term used in either context.
Delete66, southern England. Another vote for woolly hat/bobble hat. Beanie to me is the sort of woolly hat that fits smoothly to the head (no rolling up, no bobble). I'd say I first heard the word 15-20 years ago.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Mandy Shaw above - a beanie is a smoothly fitting woolly hat that does not have any kind of bobble on top. All beanies could also be called woolly hats, but not all woolly hats are beanies. I'm also British, early 50s. I can't think when I first heard the term.
ReplyDeleteUK here, and older. I'm rather with Mandy Shaw that a 'beanie' is more like a skull cap, and usually black, with woolly hat the generic term, though I have referred to them as 'thinsulate hats'. That is a brand name, a bit like the older practice of referring to any vacuum cleaner as a 'hoover'. A hat is only a 'bobble hat' if it has a bobble on it.
ReplyDeleteHaving followed the link from "Separated by a Common Newsletter', I have never heard 'toboggan' used to describe anything else other than what I assume the chap means by a 'sled' though that is 'sledge' in BrEnglish. 'Toboggan' is the normal word here for the thing children slide down hills on when it snows. To me, it has no other meaning, but it sounds as though it has come into English from another language.
Seasonally, apart from a bobsleigh which is used in a particular sport, a sleigh to my understanding is more like a cart with runners in stead of wheels and is pulled by horses as in old Russia - or, I suppose reindeer though whether they can actually be trained to do that in real life, I've no idea.
Yes, I have only ever heard "toboggan" in the context of a device on which to go downhill in the snow. For me, a toboggan or a sledge has to have runners and a seat, whereas the modern plastic ones that can be used on frosted grass as well, are sleds! And I have just remembered that I first heard "beanie" used in the context of a woolly hat in 2007! (UK, Southern, elderly).
DeleteWhen I was a kid in the 1960s and 70s in New York State, a toboggan was strictly a wooden, flat bottomed sled where the front end curled up and back towards the rider(s). It also had a rope that ran from the back down both sides and up to the top of the front rounded part, used to hold onto and (roughly) steer it.
DeleteAlso a New York State kid from the 60s, and I agree 100% with Ronald Cammarata's description.
DeleteTo Anonymous above, you are correct that "toboggan" came into English from another language, in this case Algonquian through French Canadian. This is according to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (AmE), which defines it as both the sled and the stocking cap but labels the latter as "Chiefly southern and Midland US". It's interesting that it somehow emigrated to the UK.
Sorry. For some reason my name didn't appear on the previous post. It should be on this one.
ReplyDeleteWandering off to other kinds of millinery, to me a "toque" was the kind of unbrimmed hat the late Queen Mary used to wear
ReplyDeleteTo me, a "toque" was the kind of unbrimmed hat the late Queen Mary used to wear, at her most formal
ReplyDelete