Now rare. Also 8 toupé, tupee, toppee, 9 towpee. [app. ad. F. toupet: see next.] A curl or artificial lock of hair on the top of the head, esp. as a crowning feature of a periwig; a periwig in which the front hair was combed up, over a pad, into such a top-knot, worn by both sexes in the 18th c.; also the natural hair dressed in this mode; a patch of false hair or small wig to cover a bald place.
1731. Fielding, Grubstreet Op., III. xv. Love in his lac’d coat lies, And peeps from his toupee.
1742. Pope, Dunc., IV. 88. Whate’er of dunce in College or in Town Sneers at another, in toupee or gown.
1753. in Fairholt, Costume in Eng. (1885), I. 376. A tye-wig is banished for a pigeon-winged toupée.
1770. Barretti, Journ. fr. Lond. to Genoa, I. 137. I hate to see a little girl with a tupee.
1778. F. Marion, in Harper’s Mag., Sept. (1883), 546/1. The Lt. Colo recomends to every Soldier to have … the fore top short without toppee & short at the sides.
1843. Macaulay, Ess., Mme. D’Arblay (1887), 740. He stalked about the small parlour, brushing the ceiling with his toupee.
1862. Catal. Internat. Exhib., Brit., II. No. 4586. Fronts, partings, and toupées on the same novel principle.
attrib. 1817. Coleridge, Satyrane’s Lett., iii. 241. In the portrait of Lessing there was a toupee perriwig.
† b. One who wears a toupee; a person of fashion; a beau, a spark, a buck. Obs.
1727. Pope, etc., Art of Sinking, x. 94. Then oh! she cries, what slaves I round me see? Here a bright Redcoat, there a smart Toupee.
1747. Gentl. Mag., Nov., 537/2. Here swiftly move toupee’s, in spruce undress.
Hence Toupeed a., wearing a toupee.
1765. Caledonian Mercury, 21 Oct., 1/2. Lastly, at the price of half a day’s wages, has his pinnacle most egregiously toupeed, till at last he much resembles a calf, who, having push’d its head into a bundle of straw, runs away with one half of it about its horns.
1847. R. Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh, 45. Their toupeed and deep-skirted beaux.
