Word.ws English Dictionary

billycock

billycock noun: a felt hat with a rounded crown, similar to a bowler.

Noun

billycock (plural billycocks)

  1. (dated) A felt hat with a rounded crown, similar to a bowler.
    • a young man with a billycock hat on the back of his head tumbled up the steps in his eagerness.1911, GK Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown
    • All this blazed up and showed faces far back, round, pale, smooth, bearded, some with billycock hats [...].1922, Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, paperback edition, Vintage Classics, page 68

Examples of billycock in a sentence

  • 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 [...].1936, Djuna Barnes, Nightwood, Faber & Faber, published 2007, page 56:
  • the increasing paralysis confined her to this steel trolley, pushed by a gloved attendant dressed in a billycock hat and a long grey dustcoat.1978, Lawrence Durrell, Livia (Avignon Quintet), Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 372:

Forms of billycock

pluralbillycocks
alternative formbilly-cock

Origin of billycock

Apparently an alteration of earlier bully-cocked.

Questions about billycock

What does billycock mean?
Billycock means a felt hat with a rounded crown, similar to a bowler.
How do you use billycock in a sentence?
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 [...].
What part of speech is billycock?
Billycock is a noun.
What is the plural of billycock?
The plural of billycock is billycocks.

Words near billycock in the dictionary

  1. billyboys
  2. billycan
  3. billycans
  4. billycart
  5. billycarts
  6. billycock
  7. billycocks
  8. Billyeald
  9. billyful
  10. billyfuls
  11. Billygate

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: billycock (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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