Our word list doesn't have either
hatteries or
hattery at present, EF & O'sD. As well as being in the OED,
hattery is also in the more moderately sized (two-volume) Shorter Oxford:
A place where hats are made or sold. Also hats, collectively.
So that's a good sign. However, I do like to see some evidence that a word does have, or has in the past had, at least some use.
The thousands of Google hits for
hatteries seem to be almost entirely mis-scanned representations of
batteries. This seems to be resulting from the same phenomenon I noted recently when trying to find examples of
realties and everything I came up with was meant to be
realities. Website content is increasingly being created by scanning printed texts and running them through an optical character recognition program, and then NOT proof-reading the results.
Hence we get all these false hits in the normal Google search, and even more in Google Book Search. It's all very well having "all the world's knowledge at your fingertips", but if the result is that the Web is an ocean of gibberish, it's not to my liking, I'm afraid. When I checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English I found the same phenomenon - just one hit on
hatteries, and that was from a
Rolling Stone article about a device that used "AA hatteries". Grrr!
The page you glanced at, EF & O'sD, that caused you to think
hatteries is being used to mean something like "large quantities of batteries" was probably
this one, from the Caden Said blog, in which a fond parent shares with us the endearing sayings of an infant child. "Caden is just fascinated with trains which require large quantities of batteries now know as 'hatteries'" probably should be read as "...trains which require large quantities of (batteries now know[n] as 'hatteries')" rather than "...trains which require (large quantities of batteries) now know[n] as 'hatteries'".
Obviously the fact that it's so hard to find examples where people actually wrote a word intentionally is a sign that the word is fairly rare. There are better-known alternatives to
hattery.
Hat shop is probably the expression that most people would use these days, but
millinery can also be used, though some dictionaries restrict that word to women's hats. (
Milliner and
millinery are both in our list, and the latter was the nine-letter word for a daily puzzle last June.)
However, there are some businesses using
hattery in their names. There's The Hattery of Georgetown, in Washington, DC - perhaps RM knows of it. Also The Hattery in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains in Australia. And there's even
one in Estonia - Punnivinn may know of that one. Since the Estonian website has multiple language options, I am able to infer that
Kübarakoda is the equivalent word in Estonian. If that's correct, our Estonian vocabulary is increasing in leaps and bounds.
There's also
The Headless Horseman's Hattery, by Kenn Nesbitt, on the Poetry for Kids website. So the word is in occasional use - enough to justify its inclusion I think. So I'll add
hattery and its plural to our word list.
