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brick in one's hat. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word
brick in one's hat, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say
brick in one's hat in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word
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English
Etymology
US, circa 1846. Presumably due to staggering walk when drunk; compare top-heavy with drink.
Pronunciation
Noun
brick in one's hat
- (New England, obsolete, idiomatic) Drunkenness.
1846 November, “Magnelia Pedestria; or, Leaves from a Pedestrian’s Note Book”, in The Yale Literary Magazine, volume 12, number 1, page 33:Seated at the same table with our Mr.—, was a gentleman, who, to use the current phrase, ‘had a brick in his hat.’
1849, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanagh, pages 177–178:Her husband had taken to the tavern, and often came home very late, “with a brick in his hat,” as Sally expressed it.
Usage notes
Used in various constructions, particularly “with a brick in his hat” and “to have a brick in one’s hat”, meaning “to be drunk”.
Synonyms
References
- ^ See Yale quote of 1846 referring to it as a “current phrase”.
- ^
John Stephen Farmer, William Ernest Henley, A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English, 1905, p. 216
- Richard Hopwood Thornton, An American Glossary, Volume 1, 1912, p. 101
- Hendrickson, Robert (2000) The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms, Infobase Publishing, →ISBN, page 239