Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Usage examples of "top-hat".
He wore a shiny top-hat and an expensive fur coat, and his neat morning coat, fine linen, unobtrusive black tie and pearl pin suggested the high finance rather than the backstairs of revolution.
Paris which, no matter what changes had come about in human costume, feminine fashions, top-hats, frock-coats, or facial whiskerage had themselves changed very little.
It was no use denying that the tall man with glasses looming over the bridegroom's shoulder, and looking absurd in his rented morning suit and top-hat, was me.
As to your practice, if a gentleman walks into my rooms smelling of iodoform, with a black mark of nitrate of silver upon his right forefinger, and a bulge on the right side of his top-hat to show where he has secreted his stethoscope, I must be dull, indeed, if I do not pronounce him to be an active member of the medical profession.
He started to giggle, and there he stood, this tiny Oriental person dressed in a top-hat and tails, clinging to my shoulders and giggling quite uncontrollably now.
I know, of course, that stockbrokers wear very shiny top-hats, which they remove when they sing “God Save the King,” as they invariably do in a crisis.
A rotund Falstaff escorted a bangled belly dancer, a top-hatted Marlene Dietrich clone fluttered false eyelashes seductively at a matador, Marie Antoinette simpered through a mask-on-a-stick at a vizarded Sherlock Holmes, a Lakota chief in war paint offered a drink to a demure Wonder Woman, the Mad Hatter cackled at a joke told by a Chinese dragon with a two-meter tail supported by psychokinesis, Achilles and Patroclus strolled together arm in arm, clad in golden Greek armor, and the band—with beaming Shig Morita conducting from the piano—launched into "Stray Cat Strut.
The top-hat of the Colgate's representative displays an elongated comma of white pigeon-dung.