Meaning
Three successes of the same kind by one person in a single match or short span: in cricket, three wickets taken with three consecutive deliveries; in soccer and ice hockey, three goals in one game; and by extension any triple achievement, such as three consecutive titles, awards or election victories. Hyphenation varies: hat-trick is standard in British English, hat trick in North American usage. In baseball the word historically meant striking out three times - a misfortune, not a triumph. Hockey fans throw hats onto the ice after a hat trick, a custom of the mid-20th century with competing origin legends. Regional use: Britain and the Commonwealth for cricket and football; also widespread in North America for ice hockey and worldwide in general use.
Origin
Cricket, nineteenth century. The customary story: H. H. Stephenson took three wickets with three consecutive balls for the All-England Eleven at Sheffield in 1858, and spectators held a collection with which a hat was bought for him - verified on Wikipedia's Hat-trick article, following the Extended OED. But the print record complicates a neat 1858 coining: Wikipedia gives the first known print use in the cricket sense as 1865 (the Chelmsford Chronicle, verified on the fetched page), and the OED factsheet dates its earliest evidence for the noun hat trick to 1840, in the Boston Morning Post, in the conjuring sense, labelling the cricket sense 1860s - verified directly. Word Histories adds a magician's hat trick in the Caledonian Mercury of 6 July 1848 and parliamentary hat tricks from 1886. So the reward-a-bowler-with-a-hat custom explains the cricket term, but the phrase itself antedates Stephenson in print. It spread to football (the first international hat-trick, John McDougall for Scotland, 2 March 1878) and ice hockey, then to general use.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a natural hat trick
- a perfect hat trick
- hat trick
Usage Examples
- Rifling a shot into the top corner for his hat-trick, the teenage striker left the pitch to applause from even the away fans.
- She completed a hat-trick of consecutive national titles, a feat nobody had managed since the 1960s.
- When the winger buried his third goal of the night, the traditional rain of hats came down from the stands onto the ice.