Meaning
Old-fashioned, out of date, or no longer interesting because it has become over-familiar to everyone; hackneyed. Used predicatively ('that argument is old hat') and, hyphenated, attributively ('a few old-hat ideas about design'). Everyday and mildly dismissive, implying boredom rather than contempt. Regional use: General English (clothing origin).
Origin
The Phrase Finder traces the modern sense to the early 20th century, citing Quiller-Couch's 1911 novel Brother Copas, where even Satan and his fork 'have become old hat'; Merriam-Webster independently gives 1911 as the first known use. The comparison rests on a hat grown old: Gary Martin suggests Quiller-Couch was evoking the worn, tired look of a hat long past its best, so the popular gloss 'hats go out of fashion' is a reasonable paraphrase of the image but is not the specific mechanism any source documents. Separately, 'old hat' had an older, vulgar slang sense for the female genitals, recorded in D'Urfey's 1697 play The Intrigues at Versailles and in Francis Grose's 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, where Grose's explanation is an obvious pun. Whether that crude sense is connected to the modern one is unclear - The Phrase Finder notes it is not even certain Grose's wordplay was original to him - so the link should be treated as unestablished.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- become old hat
- old hat to someone
- old-hat (attributive adjective)
- that's old hat
Usage Examples
- Fax machines are old hat now that everyone signs contracts on their phones.
- Her staging made a story feel urgent again, even though the plot itself was distinctly old hat.
- None of this is old hat to the students seeing the play for the first time.