Meaning
A declaration of total confidence that something will not happen or is not true. By vowing to perform an impossible, self-punishing act if proved wrong, the speaker asserts certainty, normally in the form 'I'll eat my hat if...'. Informal, jocular hyperbole; often slightly theatrical. Regional use: General English (clothing origin).
Origin
The anchor asks whether the phrase is 19th-century and connected to Dickens's Pickwick Papers; both points need qualification. Etymonline dates 'eat one's hat' to 1770 and reports it is 'said to have been originally' 'eat Old Rowley's hat', Old Rowley being the familiar nickname of Charles II, so hat-eating vows predate Dickens by decades. Dickens did use a vivid extended version in The Pickwick Papers (chapter 42, 1837), where a drunken clerical gentleman in the Fleet prison says, 'Well, if I knew as little of life as that, I'd eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole.' The mechanism is a comic wager on an absurdity: because nobody can eat a hat, the speaker stakes everything on being right. It belongs to a family of self-harming oaths ('I'll eat my head', 'or I'm a Dutchman'), the last of which Dickens also deployed elsewhere. The 1770 date and the Dickens citation are documented; the Old Rowley detail is reported by Etymonline as traditional rather than proven.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- eat one's hat
- I'd eat my hat
- I'll eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole
- I'll eat my hat if I'm wrong
Usage Examples
- If the committee approves the mural on the first attempt, I'll eat my hat.
- He said he'd eat his hat if the train arrived before nine, and of course we were still on the platform at half past.
- They'll extend the deadline again this year - otherwise I'll eat my hat.