gray hat
A morally ambiguous character; an antihero.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“The gray hat in the film helps the police but steals for himself.”
“He plays a gray hat who lies to protect his family.”
“She writes about a gray hat who protects the city while breaking its laws.”
“The story features a gray hat who hacks into banks to donate the stolen money to local charities.”
“I prefer watching a gray hat because their complicated choices feel more realistic than a perfect hero.”
“The politician acts like a gray hat by using his secret connections to expose corruption while hiding his own past mistakes from the public.”
“In the novel, the gray hat protagonist, a disgraced detective turned vigilante, hunts criminals with methods that blur the line between justice and vengeance.”
From being grey (“gray”), a mix between black and white, morally grey/gray. From white hat + black hat. From cowboy country and western fiction, where good guys wear white Stetson hats with light attire, and bad guys wear black ones with black attire. From chivalric fiction, with white knights and black knights. From the association of the color white with good and black with evil.
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all hat and no cattle
Full of big talk but lacking action, power, or substance; pretentious.
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all hat and no cowboy
Full of big talk but lacking action, power, or substance; pretentious.
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black hat
A villain in a story, especially in a Western (a film or other work of the Western genre).
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brick in one's hat
Drunkenness.
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buy straw hats in winter
Of stocks, to buy when both demand and price are low, so as to sell when demand and price are high.
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does the Pope wear a funny hat
Obviously! Rhetorical question in response to a question where the answer is an emphatic yes.
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eat one's hat
Used in a result clause to express disbelief in a proposition expressed in a conditional clause.
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get grey hair from
To acquire great frustration, confusion, or anxiousness from (something or someone).
Last updated August 10, 2026