Hat Trivia
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8correct to beat the crowd
This hat trivia quiz has 110 free questions with answers and covers headwear from Ötzi's bearskin cap to Pharrell's Grammys hat: how the top hat, bowler, fedora, trilby, homburg and boater got their names, the true origins of the Panama hat and the ten-gallon Stetson, the beret's journey from Pyrenean shepherds to tank crews, the fez, ushanka, turban, kippah, mitre and mortarboard, and the bearskins, bicornes and tricornes of military dress. It also takes in famous hats and hat wearers, from Lincoln's stovepipe and Indiana Jones's fedora to the Sorting Hat, the Cat in the Hat and Oddjob's lethal bowler. There are questions on hat etiquette, on the mercury-poisoned hatters behind 'mad as a hatter', on the world's oldest hat shop, on Royal Ascot's dress code, on hard hats and on why a hat trick is called a hat trick. It suits pub quiz rounds, fashion and history fans, and anyone who has ever wondered why a bowler is a derby in America. Every answer has been checked against a primary or encyclopaedic source and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
30 of 110 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which British naval hero had London hatter Lock & Co. fit his hats with a built-in eye visor?
Horatio Nelson
Horatio Nelson. He had lost the sight of his right eye in Corsica, and wore one of the hats from Lock & Co., billed as the world's oldest hat shop, at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Q 02The Sorting Hat first belonged to which Hogwarts founder?
Godric Gryffindor
Godric Gryffindor. In the Hat's own song, he whipped it off his head and the four founders put some brains in it, so it could go on sorting students after they were gone.
Q 03Which veteran British actor voiced the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films?
Leslie Phillips
Leslie Phillips. Famous for playing plummy cads with a 'Ding dong!' catchphrase, he was born a Cockney in Tottenham and was sent to stage school to lose the accent.
Q 04What colours are the stripes on the tall top hat worn by Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat?
Red and white
Red and white. Dr. Seuss wrote the book to replace dull Dick and Jane school primers and, by his usual account, built it on the first two rhyming words he found on the approved word list.
Q 05Who played the title role in the 2003 live-action film The Cat in the Hat?
Mike Myers
Mike Myers. The film was so widely panned that Dr. Seuss's widow, Audrey Geisel, banned any further live-action adaptations of her husband's books.
Q 06Which fictional detective is popularly pictured wearing a deerstalker cap?
Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle's stories never mention a deerstalker by name; illustrator Sidney Paget drew it on Holmes for The Strand Magazine, and the image stuck.
Q 07The sombrero takes its name from the Spanish word for what?
Shade
Shade. Sombrero comes from sombra, and in Spanish the word means any hat at all, so Mexicans call the giant wide-brimmed kind a sombrero de charro.
Q 08Despite its name, the Panama hat is traditionally woven in which country?
Ecuador
Ecuador. The hats were shipped to the Isthmus of Panama for sale and export, so buyers named them after the place they bought them, not the place they were woven.
Q 09Which small, brimless hat became First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy's trademark in the early 1960s?
Pillbox
Pillbox. She had not cared for hats until the milliner Halston made her one for the 1961 inauguration; it became her trademark and made his name.
Q 10The bowler hat is known by what alternative name in the United States?
Derby
Derby. Americans probably named it after England's Derby horse race, where fashionable men wore the new stiff felt hat.
Q 11Which US president kept important papers tucked inside his tall stovepipe hat?
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln. The silk top hat he wore to Ford's Theatre on the night he was shot carried a black mourning band he had added in memory of his son Willie.
Q 12Which Harrison Ford character is rarely seen without his brown fedora?
Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones. The Last Crusade's prologue shows how he got it: a treasure hunter who has just beaten the teenage Indy to a prize hands over his own fedora as a mark of respect.
Q 13Fans of which sport throw their hats onto the playing surface when a player scores three goals?
Ice hockey
Q 21Which hat takes its name from the heroine of an 1894 novel by George du Maurier?
Trilby
Trilby. The heroine wore the soft felt hat in the 1895 stage version, and the same novel gave English the word Svengali, after the hypnotist who controls her.
Q 22The bowler hat is said to have been designed to protect which workers from low-hanging branches?
Gamekeepers
Gamekeepers. By the hatter Lock & Co.'s account, Edward Coke ordered it for his keepers in 1849, and legend says he stamped on it twice to test it before paying.
Q 23Which British general adopted a black beret with two badges as his trademark during the Second World War?
Bernard Montgomery
Ice hockey. Rival legends from Toronto, Montreal and Guelph each credit a local hatmaker who gave a free hat to any player scoring three goals in a game.
Q 14The sporting term 'hat-trick' was first used in which sport?
Cricket
Cricket. A bowler who took three wickets with three balls in a row is said to have been rewarded with a new hat, bought by his club or with a collection from the crowd.
Q 15Which frontiersman's 1950s Disney TV series set off a children's craze for coonskin caps?
Davy Crockett
Davy Crockett. Fess Parker's fur cap set off an overnight craze, and Walt Disney admitted being caught with only three episodes and a hero already killed at the Alamo.
Q 16In the classic winter song, which character comes to life when children place an old silk hat on his head?
Frosty the Snowman
Frosty the Snowman. The 1950 song was written to follow Gene Autry's hit 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer' of the year before, and Autry recorded it in search of a second seasonal success.
Q 17The ushanka, a classic Russian hat, takes its name from the Russian word for what?
Ears
Ears, ushi in Russian. The Red Army adopted the hat after the Winter War of 1939–40, modelling it on the fur caps of the better-equipped Finns.
Q 18The Hebrew word 'kippah', the name of the Jewish skullcap, literally means what?
Dome
Dome. The Yiddish name, yarmulke, is popularly explained as Aramaic for 'fear of the King', but dictionaries trace it to Polish and perhaps to a medieval Latin word for a hood.
Q 19The word 'milliner' for a hat-maker derives from the name of which Italian city?
Milan
Milan. A milliner was probably first a 'Milaner', a merchant selling the city's ribbons, silks and straw work, and the original milliners were men.
Q 20The fedora is named after an 1882 play written for which famous actress?
Sarah Bernhardt
Sarah Bernhardt. She wore a soft, centre-creased hat as Princess Fédora, and women's-rights campaigners took up the style before it became a men's hat.
Bernard Montgomery. The beret was a gift from the tank crewman who drove him in the desert, and he wore the Royal Tank Regiment badge on it beside his general's badge.
Q 24The homburg hat, popularised by the future Edward VII, is named after a spa town in which country?
Germany
Germany. Edward, then Prince of Wales, brought the hat home from the spa at Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt, and it caught on as a less formal alternative to the top hat.
Q 25'Mad as a hatter' is popularly traced to hat-makers poisoned by which element used in felt-making?
Mercury
Mercury. The tremors it caused were so common among hat-makers in Danbury, Connecticut, that the condition was known there as the 'Danbury shakes'.
Q 26In which US city did youths smash men's straw hats in the Straw Hat Riot of 1922?
New York
New York. An unwritten rule said men must switch to felt hats by September 15, and youths who began knocking off straw hats two days early set off days of street brawls.
Q 27Which US president was photographed in a Panama hat at the canal site in 1906, boosting its popularity?
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt. He was on the first trip abroad by any sitting president, but gold-rush travellers crossing the isthmus had made the hats popular decades earlier.
Q 28Which leader banned the fez in Turkey in 1925 as part of a modernising 'Hat Revolution'?
Kemal Atatürk
Kemal Atatürk. A century earlier Sultan Mahmud II had imposed the fez for much the same reason: to modernise dress and replace the turban.
Q 29The Grenadier Guards adopted their bearskin caps after beating Napoleon's Imperial Guard at which battle?
Waterloo
Waterloo. The 1st Foot Guards took the tall fur cap, a grenade badge and their new name, the Grenadier Guards, from the French grenadiers they were thought to have beaten.
Q 30In which South American country are bowler hats a signature of the indigenous women known as cholitas?
Bolivia
Bolivia. The hat was a European import first made for men, which Aymara and Quechua women adopted as their own; in La Paz it is worn small and balanced on top of the head.