• (British, America) IPA: /hæt/
• (Canada, California, RP) IPA: [hat]
• (Northern US) IPA: [hɛt]

hat (plural hats)

1. A covering for the head, often in the approximate form of a cone or a cylinder closed at its top end, and sometimes having a brim and other decoration.
   • 1913, Mrs. [Marie] Belloc Lowndes, chapter II, in The Lodger, London: Methuen, OCLC 7780546 ↗; republished in Novels of Mystery: The Lodger; The Story of Ivy; What Really Happened, New York, N.Y.: Longmans, Green and Co., […], [1933], OCLC 2666860 ↗, page 0091 ↗:

     There was a neat hat-and-umbrella stand, and the stranger's weary feet fell soft on a good, serviceable dark-red drugget, which matched in colour the flock-paper on the walls.

2. (figuratively) A particular role or capacity that a person might fill.
   • 1993, Susan Loesser, A Most Remarkable Fella: Frank Loesser and the Guys and Dolls in His Life: A Portrait by His Daughter, Hal Leonard Corporation (2000), ISBN 978-0-634-00927-3, p.121 ↗:

     My mother was wearing several hats in the early fifties: hostess, scout, wife, and mother.

3. (figuratively) Any receptacle from which numbers/names are pulled out in a lottery.
   1. (figuratively, by extension) The lottery or draw itself.

      We're both in the hat: let's hope we come up against each other.

4. (video games) A hat switch.
   • 2002, Ernest Pazera, Focus on SDL, p.139:

     The third type of function allows you to check on the state of the joystick's buttons, axes, hats, and balls.

5. (typography, nonstandard, rare) The háček symbol.
   • 1997 October 6th, “Patricia V. Lehman ↗” (user name), rec.antiques ↗ (Usenet newsgroup), “Re: Unusual Mark – made in Cechoslovakia ↗”, Message ID: <34390399.BD7@umich.edu>#1/1 ↗

     I’lll have to leave it up to antiques experts to tell you when objects were marked that way, but I can tell you it’s called a “hacek” (with the hat over the “c” and pronounced “hacheck”.) It is used to show that a “c” is pronounced as “ch” and an “s” as “sh.” Sometimes linguists just call it the “hat.”

6. (programming, informal) The caret symbol ^.
7. (internet slang) User rights on a website, such as the right to edit pages others cannot.
8. (Cambridge University slang, obsolete) A student who is also the son of a nobleman (and so allowed to wear a hat instead of a mortarboard).

• (student and nobleman) gold hatband, tuft

• French: chapeau
• German: (general) Kopfbedeckung; (with peak) Kappe; (without peak, firm fabric) Hut; (without peak, soft fabric) Mütze
• Italian: cappello
• Portuguese: chapéu
• Russian: шля́па
• Spanish: sombrero

hat (hats, present participle hatting; past and past participle hatted)

1. (transitive) To place a hat on.
2. (transitive) To appoint as cardinal.
   • 1929, "Five New Hats," Time, 2 December, 1929, [http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,738201,00.html]

     It was truly a breathtaking rise. From the quiet school, Pope Pius XI had jumped Father Verdier over the heads of innumerable Bishops, made him Archbishop of Paris. Soon he was to be hatted a Prince of the Church and put in charge of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame.

1. (Scotland, Northern England or obsolete) simple past tense of hit

   When I axed him why he hat 'im, he said, "I ne know, I ne know, mate."

hat (plural hats)

1. Initialism of highest astronomical tide
2. (medicine, uncountable) Initialism of human African trypanosomiasis
3. (electronics) Initialism of hardware attached on top: a kind of expansion board for the Raspberry Pi computer