Word.ws English Dictionary

brick in one's hat

brick in one's hat noun: drunkenness.

Noun

brick in one's hat

  1. (New-England, idiomatic, obsolete) Drunkenness.
    • Seated at the same table with our Mr.—, was a gentleman, who, to use the current phrase, ‘had a brick in his hat.’1846 November, “Magnelia Pedestria; or, Leaves from a Pedestrian’s Note Book”, in The Yale Literary Magazine, volume 12, number 1, page 33
    • Her husband had taken to the tavern, and often came home very late, “with a brick in his hat,” as Sally expressed it.1849, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh, pages 177–178
    Synonyms:
    drunkenness

Synonyms of brick in one's hat

Origin of brick in one's hat

US, circa 1846. Presumably due to staggering walk when drunk; compare top-heavy with drink.

Questions about brick in one's hat

What does brick in one's hat mean?
Brick in one's hat means drunkenness.
What part of speech is brick in one's hat?
Brick in one's hat is a noun.

Words near brick in one's hat in the dictionary

  1. brick hammer
  2. brick hammers
  3. brick house
  4. brick houses
  5. brick in
  6. brick in one's hat
  7. brick it
  8. brick joke
  9. brick jokes
  10. brick off
  11. brick oneself

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brick in one's hat (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-brick in one's hat.ogg.

Cite this entry: “brick in one's hat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brick_in_one%27s_hat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.