Beanie (North America)

In parts of Canada and the United States, a beanie refers to a head-hugging brimless hat with or without a visor. Seamed beanies are made from triangular sections of cloth joined by a button at the crown, and seamed together around the sides. They can also be made from leather or silk panels.

In other English-speaking countries and parts of the US and Canada, a "beanie" is a knitted cap (often woollen), known in parts of the United States as a "stocking cap" or "beanie" and in Canada as a "tuque".

One popular style of the beanie during the early half of the twentieth century was a kind of skullcap made of four or six felt panels sewn together to form the cap. The panels were often composed of two or more different contrasting colors to give them a novel and distinctive look. This type of beanie was also very popular with some colleges and fraternities, as they would often use school colors in the different panels making up the hat.

Another style of beanie was the whoopee cap, a formed and pressed wool felted hat, with a flipped up brim that formed a band around the bottom of the cap. The band would often have a decorative repeating zig-zag or scalloped pattern cut around the edge. It was also quite common for schoolboys to adorn their beanies with buttons and pins.

The cloth-covered button on the crown is about the size of a bean seed and may be the origin of the term "beanie". Some academics believe that the term is instead derived from a type of headgear worn in some medieval universities. The yellow hats (bejaunus, meaning "yellowbill", later beanus, a term used for both the hats and the new students) evolved into the college beanies of later years.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the etymology is uncertain, but probably derives from the slang term "bean", meaning "head". In New Zealand and Australia, the term "beanie" is normally applied to a knit cap known as a tuque in Canada and parts of the US, but also may apply to the kind of skull cap historically worn by surf lifesavers and still worn during surf sports. The non-knitted variety is normally called a "cap" in other countries.

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Wikipedia