👵 An old woman 🧣 A headscarf

babushka

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A triangular headscarf tied under the chin worn by Russian women

noun
/bəˈbʊʃkə/

: babushka

I am searching for a young woman who stepped onto Ellis Island alone in 1911 with braided hair, high cheekbones, a peasant dress, and a babushka.
wear a babushka

Examples

It's his 87-year-old mother with these bottle-thick glasses... and a big babushka, saying...

Gray's Anatomy (1996)
During the winter, many elderly ladies in the village wore a babushka to protect themselves from the cold.
She's sitting there with her babushka on, going...

Gray's Anatomy (1996)
For Tanya, a new babushka.

An American Tail (1986)
She sees herself in twenty years, walking through the snow in a navy blue woolen coat, a babushka around her hair, resembling every Russian peasant woman she has ever seen.

Fiction book (1993)
The woman tied her babushka under her chin to keep her hair in place while she worked outside.
She found an old babushka in her grandmother's attic, and it reminded her of the stories her grandmother used to tell.

Surface Forms

babushka singular

babushkas plural

Etymology

Babushka comes from the Russian word babushka meaning 'grandmother', because many grandmothers wore a triangular scarf tied under the chin. So in English the word came to mean that headscarf, named after the women who often wore it.