Fedora
nounA soft felt hat with a brim and a lengthwise crease running down the crown.
How to spell fedora
6 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce fedora
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does fedora mean?
- nounA soft felt hat with a brim and a lengthwise crease running down the crown.
Fedora in a sentence
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He topped off the grey suit with a brown fedora.
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The vintage shop had a rack of wool fedora styles from the 1940s.
Where does fedora come from?
Language of origin: French
Fedora began life as a proper name rather than a hat. It comes from the title of Victorien Sardou's 1882 French play Fédora, written for the actress Sarah Bernhardt, who played the Russian princess Fédora Romazov. Bernhardt wore a soft, centre-creased felt hat with a brim turned down at the front, and the style caught on and took the heroine's name. The name Fédora itself is the French form of the Russian Fyodora, a feminine version of Fyodor, which descends from the Greek Theodoros meaning 'gift of God', from theos 'god' and doron 'gift'. The hat sense entered English in the late 1880s, becoming especially popular as men's headwear in the early twentieth century. The single spelling pitfall is the unstressed middle vowel: it sounds like a vague schwa but is written with an 'e' followed by 'd', giving fe-do-ra rather than 'fadora'.
How the word is built
- fedora (from the title of Sardou's play Fédora, a coined feminine proper name)
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