An nice French expression I discovered yesterday is bonnet à pompon, which is apparently the French equivalent of bobble hat, which some might call a beanie.
What do you call hats like this? Does the kind with a bobble have a different name?
For me the kind of hat with a bobble is a bobble hat, and the kind without is a woolly hat.
To me, that’s not a bobble, that’s a pompom. That’s partially b/c I knit and the process to make a bobble is totally different than to make a pompom, but even before I knitted I would have called that a pompom. Specifically, I would call that a “cabled hat with a pompom”. To include any kind of close fitting, knit hat I would say a “stocking cap” or “beanie”.
I don’t have a particular word for these, but the interesting thing to me is that in Indian English, all headwear without brims are caps, like the wollen cap pictured here, and the word hat is reserved for something with a circular brim. I’m not sure how this distinction breaks down in other regional variants of English.
In Dutch there is only “muts” for this – can’t think of a synonym. With or without the bobble, it’s only “muts”. If it’s made of wool, you could say “wollen muts”, which is just “woollen hat”.
Like Shanth says, there is a different word for something with a circular brim: “hoed”.
And there’s the Dutch word for the flat head piece without or with a small or partial brim (including what baseball players and fans and stereotypical US citizens wear): “pet”.
In my anklebiting days in New Zealand we called a hat like that a “pompom hat”. I seem to remember learning the word “beanie” later on, though that tells you nothing useful about names for headwear in NZ English. I think I now call all such hats beanies, with or without pompoms, but we all know the risks of self-reporting linguistic behaviour.
Looks like a tuque with a pompom to me. (Canada)
Pompom hat (London, UK).
To me it’s a bobble hat but we also called hats like this “Benny” hats after the slow-witted character from ‘Crossroads’ an old British TV soap opera.
Here in the US, it’s just a cap or snowcap.
d.m.f.
“Here in the US, it’s just a cap or snowcap.”
That evokes surreal images of snowcapped mountains.
It’s just a bobble hat to me.
I agree with Christopher Miller: to this Canadian (from Manitoba), it’s a toque. With a pom-pom, though I’d only call that out if I were trying to specifically describe it to someone.
I have a friend from North Carolina who says that these are called toboggans where he comes from.
Tansi from Manitoba
a tuque both in English and French, and in Cree = astotin
my hat = nitastotinim
your hat =kitastotinim