Your Name for a Cap of Knitted Yarn...

… or other similar fiber. I grew up in southwest Virginia in the 1970s and we always called them “toboggans”. I’ve never heard anyone outside of that area refer to them as such, and always get perplexed looks when I do so. If you don’t mind, please post the term you use and when and where you learned it.

I say toboggan, with watch cap as an alternate. Knit cap if I suspect the person I’d be addressing or describing to didn’t know the first two.

In Alabama where I spent the 40’s and 50’s it was toboggan. Less so in Tennessee where knit cap is probably the norm.

I think I learned watch cap at OJ’s trial! :smiley:

A toque of course! Watch cap can also be acceptable, but toque won’t get you any weird looks.

I think toboggan first, but if I recall correctly, folks around here use other terms, like winter hat/cap or knit hat/cap. My Daddy probably would have used watch cap.

Beanie. Knit hat/cap is acceptable, although it seems like a generic retail term. Kind of like how nobody actually says “soft drink” but soda instead. Or pop, which is probably the same group of people who say toboggan, a term I never even heard before. Toboggan means a sled.

Tuque is acceptable if you’re Canadian, but I’m not. A watch cap is similar to a beanie, but I picture it as a shrunken one, with a folded up “brim,” and just barely covering the hair. A stocking cap is a nylon stocking used by robbers. A ski hat (cap) is like a balaclava, worn by terrorists/bank robbers.

Another vote for beanie. Also, toboggan means sled here, too. I’ve heard skully before. Those usually refer to the things they give to babies in the hospital.

It can be a ski cap when it has a little ball on top, but it definitely cannot be a beanie if it does. Any term related to snow or skiing can have the little ball on top, but only those terms.

The little ball on top is important, and should have been part of the poll choices. :mad:

See, I call that a ski mask. A hat doesn’t cover the face in my world.

Of course, in my world, anything you wear on your head in the winter is a “winter hat,” regardless of style, pompoms, earflaps, etc. I acquired “toque” as the more specific term for the hat described in the OP during the 2010 Olympics, having had no previous word for this, but I’d never use it around here (Maryland) because nobody would have a clue. So I just think it and keep saying “winter hat.”

I think I would probably not understand several of the terms in the poll. Chook? Skully? Watch cap? No clue. A toboggan is a sled, a skull cap is a yarmulke, and a beanie has a propeller on it.

I use several of them interchangeably, and I suppose when I’m reading I should make note of the distinctions!

“beanie” drives me nuts.

A beanie is a felt skullcap. There is no other word for it, but plenty, as the OP has demonstrated, for a knit cap.

Being old enough to remember when beanies were worn, I voted for (the equally retro) “watch cap”. :slight_smile:

Touque, eh? :slight_smile:

I call it ‘tuque’ because I live within walking distance of the Peace Arch, and voted so. When I was a kid I called them ‘watch caps’, but only the black ones. Dad was in the Navy, so they were ‘Navy watch caps’. That’s what he called them. I’ve also called them ‘knit caps’.

FWIW, the one I wear most often is one Roomie made for me a year or so ago. It’s dark green and matches my Winter jacket. Before that, and still, when I don’t wear the handmade one, I wear a red one.

Can be a beanie or a skullcap.

I didn’t realize there were many different names. The term Touque is ubiquitous in Canada.

To ask the question in Canada would be rather like asking Americans what the wide brimmed cap baseball players wear is called.

Beanie for me now, but I also used knitted cap when I was younger (now 55) and would recognise watch cap as a term for the same item.

Ski hat (never cap). As chizzuk says, if it covers your face, it’s a ski mask. I grew up in Maryland (D.C. metro).

A toboggan is a sled. It’s always been a stocking cap for me.

I call it at watch cap. It was my headwear of choice during the run of the TV show Then Came Bronson.

Touque for anything I’d go sledding in. A watch cap doesn’t cover the ears.

(If anyone knows where to buy a felted wool watch cap please let me know. I bought two more than a decade ago in the old-man hat section of Burlington Coat Factory and haven’t seen them since.)

It’s a toque, and it’s for wintertime.