Where does the term hat-trick come from?

Score three goals in a game and you have a hat-trick. In ice hockey, fans celebrate by flinging their caps onto the ice, so it seems obvious that hockey must be where the hats came from. But the phrase was being used in English cricket long before anyone threw a beanie at a rink.

The short answer

The term comes from cricket. In 1858, at Hyde Park in Sheffield, the bowler H.H. Stephenson, playing for an All-England eleven against Hallam, took three wickets with three consecutive balls. A collection was taken up and he was presented with a hat bought with the money. The Oxford English Dictionary says the term came into use after that feat.

The real story

Three wickets in three balls is a rare and celebrated achievement in cricket, and the 1858 match itself is well documented. What is less clear is exactly who first turned it into a phrase. The contemporary report of the match does not use the words ‘hat trick’, and the earliest known printed use in the sporting sense comes from the Chelmsford Chronicle in 1865, describing a match between Grays and Romford.

There is also a playful twist. ‘Hat trick’ already existed before 1858 as a term for a conjuring trick involving a hat, the sort of thing where a magician produces a rabbit. One American newspaper used it that way in 1840. So the cricket phrase may have been a pun: a bowler’s feat so unlikely it seemed like magic, and one that came with an actual hat as a prize.

From cricket, the term spread. Horse racing had borrowed it by the 1890s, and it later spread into football, rugby and hockey, where it settled into its best-known meaning of three goals by one player in a game.

The hockey tradition of throwing hats onto the ice came much later, and its origins are themselves debated. Accounts from Toronto, Montreal and Guelph compete for the honour, with one Guelph story involving a hat company giving fedoras to junior players who scored three goals in the 1940s.

So the hat in hat-trick was real, and so was the trick, but the exact moment the two words were joined for sport is lost. That small gap is honest history: the event is documented, the phrase is documented, and the link between them is the most likely explanation rather than a signed confession.

Why people get it wrong

The hockey custom is so literal, with actual hats raining onto the ice, that it looks like the origin rather than a later celebration. In North America, hockey is also where most people first hear the phrase. Cricket, especially an 1858 match in Sheffield, is simply not on most people’s radar.

“A bloke took three wickets and got a hat. Brilliant. I’ve been at the bottom of a shoe for decades and nobody’s ever bought me so much as a lace.”