An obsolete or dialectal term for a helmet or head armor, possibly from Anglo-Saxon or early English military terminology.
Possibly from Old English har 'army' or her 'helmet' combined with -out or -ot, though the etymology is uncertain. The word appears in very old texts and may be related to Germanic armor terminology, but it has largely disappeared from English.
Harmout is so obscure it barely appears in modern dictionaries, which is actually interesting—it's a ghost word, a relic of Old English military terminology that survived in some regional dialects but lost out to 'helmet' and 'armor.' These words tell us about which technologies lasted (helmet) and which didn't.
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