Word.ws English Dictionary

pull out of a hat

pull out of a hat is the alternative form of pull out of the hat.

Meaning of pull out of the hat

Verb

pull out of the hat (third-person singular simple present pulls out of the hat, present participle pulling out of the hat, simple past and past participle pulled out of the hat)

  1. (idiomatic) To select at random, or seemingly at random.
    • Having spent more than £500,000 on players last summer, Crawley can hardly be classed as minnows but they have still punched way above their weight and this kind of performance means no-one will relish pulling them out of the hat in Sunday's draw.2011 January 29, Chris Bevan, “Torquay 0 - 1 Crawley Town”, in BBC

Forms of pull out of a hat

third-person singular presentpulls out of a hat
present participlepulling out of a hat
past participlepulled out of a hat
pastpulled out of a hat

Questions about pull out of a hat

What is pull out of a hat the alternative form of?
Pull out of a hat is the alternative form of pull out of the hat.

Words near pull out of a hat in the dictionary

  1. pull oneself up by one's bootstraps
  2. pull oneself up by one's own bootstraps
  3. pull out
  4. pull out all stops
  5. pull out all the stops
  6. pull out of a hat
  7. pull out of one's arse
  8. pull out of one's ass
  9. pull out of the bag
  10. pull out of the fire
  11. pull out of the hat

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: pull out of a hat (page history and authors); pull out of the 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.

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Cite this entry: “pull out of a hat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/pull_out_of_a_hat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.