The square academic cap, graduate cap, or mortarboard (because of its similarity in appearance to the hawk used by bricklayers to hold mortar) or Oxford cap, is an item of academic head dress consisting of a horizontal square board fixed upon a skull-cap, with a tassel attached to the center. In the UK and the US, it is commonly referred to informally in conjunction with an academic gown worn as a cap and gown. It is also often termed a square, trencher, or corner-cap in Australia. The adjective academical is also used. In the US and UK, it is usually referred to more generically as a mortarboard, or (in the U.S.) simply cap.
The cap, together with the gown and (sometimes) a hood, now form the customary uniform of a university graduate, in many parts of the world, following a British model.
Read more about Square Academic Cap: Origins, Variants, Tassel, Traditional Wear
Famous quotes containing the words square, academic and/or cap:
“This house was designed and constructed with the freedom of stroke of a forester’s axe, without other compass and square than Nature uses.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“‘I have cap and bells,’ he pondered,
‘I will send them to her and die’;
And when the morning whitened
He left them where she went by.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)