Why is 3 times called a hat trick?

Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary

See also: hattrick, hat-trick, and Hattrick

c.1877, originally from cricket, meaning the taking of three wickets with three consecutive balls. Allegedly, a hat trick entitled the bowler to receive a commemorative hat from his club, or alternatively it may have entitled him to pass the hat for a cash collection.

Pronunciation[edit]

• enPR: hătʹrĭk, IPA(key): /ˈhætɹɪk/
• Rhymes: -ætɹɪk

Noun[edit]

hat trick (plural hat tricks)

1. (cricket) Three wickets taken by a bowler in three consecutive balls.
2. (ice hockey, soccer) Three goals scored by one player in a game, in ice hockey usually followed by fans throwing their hats onto the rink. After Jones' hat trick, the attendents had to pick up about 75 hats from the ice.
3. (sports, by extension) Three achievements in a single game, or similar, such as three consecutive wins. A "Gordie Howe hat trick" comprises a goal, an assist, and a fighting major penalty. The car salesman came home with front-row seats after turning a hat trick at work.
4. (baseball, ironic) Striking out three times in one game. Jones got a hat trick yesterday. Let's see if he can do something today.
5. (by extension) Three incidents or achievements that occur together.

   • 2002, Douglas Heil, Prime Time Authorship: Works About and by Three TV Dramatists, →ISBN:

     And with the debut of his new series Hyperion Bay in 1998, Dougherty accomplished the rare "hat trick" in television: the pilot was written, executive-produced, and codirected by Dougherty.

   • 2015, Les Roberts, The Ashtabula Hat Trick: A Milan Jacovich Mystery, →ISBN:

     Three murders in less than two weeks. That's a hat trick.

   • 2017, Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World, page 1473523923:

     To pull this off, the authority required three things: the ability to identify cases in a timely fashion, and so determine the infection's direction of travel; an understanding of how the disease spread (by water? air? insect vector?), and hence the measures that were likely to block it; and some means of ensuring compliance with those measures. When all three of these ingredients – which we'll describe in more detail in the following sections – were in place, containment could be extremely effective, but a hat-trick was rare.

6. (UK politics, historical) A means of securing a seat in the House of Commons by placing one's hat upon it.
7. Any magic trick performed with a hat.

Derived terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Cristiano Ronaldo has done it 60 times; Lionel Messi, 55. Back in the mid-20th century, Brazilian great Pelé managed it on no fewer than 92 occasions.

In soccer, there really is a particular prestige to scoring a hat-trick. Sure, it’s nice to get off the mark with a goal, or even plunder a brace; but a striker has really earned their keep if they can find the net three times in a single game. British journalist Adam Hurrey, the author of the book Football Clichés, has described the hat-trick as a “perfectly poised footballing achievement”.

Bale, Rooney, Ronaldo...

Hat-tricks have signalled the arrival of a superstar - see Gareth Bale’s gallivanting 2010 treble against Inter Milan, or Wayne Rooney’s explosive debut for Manchester United in 2004. They have even persuaded fans to applaud opposing players, an honour United’s home crowd bestowed on Ronaldo Nazário when he pinged in three goals for Real Madrid in a 2003 Champions League tie at Old Trafford.

Back in 1966, meanwhile, Geoff Hurst’s World Cup final hat-trick for England prompted Kenneth Wolstenholme to utter probably the most famous line ever spoken by an English-language soccer commentator:

And after no other feat does a soccer player get to take the match ball home.

Hurst’s three-goal haul in ‘66, it’s worth noting, is also an example of what’s known in soccer as the ‘perfect’ hat-trick: scoring one with the right foot, one with the left, and one with a header.

Where does the term ‘hat-trick’ come from?

Cricket, it seems. In the bat-and-ball sport, invented by the English some time around the 16th century, a bowler is said to have achieved a hat-trick if they get three batsmen out from three successive deliveries. Cricket’s use of the term only for consecutive wickets clearly differs from soccer, which counts three goals scored at any point in the same match as a hat-trick.

According to the Extended Oxford English Dictionary, cricket adopted the phrase in the mid-19th century, when a bowler was rewarded for taking three straight wickets by being given a hat. “It came into use after HH Stephenson took three wickets in three balls for the all-England eleven against the twenty-two of Hallam at the Hyde Park ground, Sheffield in 1858,” the OED says. “A collection was held for Stephenson (as was customary for outstanding feats by professionals) and he was presented with a cap or hat bought with the proceeds.”

In his book Arm-ball to Zooter: a Sideways Look at the Language of Cricket, Lawrence Booth says another, similar explanation is that after a bowler managed a hat-trick, “a collection would be taken among the crowd, who generously placed their florins and farthings in - you guessed it - a hat.”

In Allen’s Dictionary of Phrases, the lexicographer Robert Allen agrees that ‘hat-trick’ entered sporting parlance via cricket in the 19th century. “In the 1870s,” Allen says, “the phrase is found in a Cricketing Companion written by one of the family of Lillywhites: ‘Having on one occasion taken six wickets in seven balls, thus performing the hat-trick successfully’.”

However, Allen also notes that another possible reason for the use of the term to refer to a series of three is its connection to magicians. “A hat-trick was originally a trick performed by a conjuror, typically involving three hats,” he writes.

While it is sport that launched ‘hat-trick’ into the everyday lexicon, its use has expanded into all other fields of life. In June 2021, for example, writer Michael Wolff’s third book on the Trump presidency was greeted by the Times headline: “Trump author completes hat‑trick with inside story of defeat.”

And although the term generally refers to accomplishments, it can also be used to describe negative circumstances or outcomes. For example, when the UK’s governing political party, the Conservatives, were beaten in three local by-elections at the end of June, several British newspapers reported that the Tories had suffered a “hat-trick of defeats”.