Chefs are literally the chiefs of the kitchen, as indicated by the tall hat that they alone are allowed to wear. Chefs started wearing these tall hats in the 1820s, although much earlier than then English cooks had sometimes worn thick, black caps to prevent their scalps from being burned as they carried roasts on their heads from the kitchen to the table. Chef derives, like chief, from the Latin caput, meaning head. Whereas the other words that derive from caput appeared in English in the fourteenth century—including chief, captain, chieftain, and achieve (when you achieve you become a chief)—the word chef was not adopted from French until the mid nineteenth century.