Entry · catalog no. 2401
bull's wool
/ /bʊlz ˈwʊl/ /BULLZ wool
noun · Harlem, New York City; earlier across the American hobo, prison, and underworld circuits · 1930s
✓ Verified
1.
Clothing that is cheap, coarse, secondhand, or homemade — the suit a man wears because it is what he could get, not what he wanted. In Black usage the word narrowed toward stolen clothes specifically, the goods that came out of a robbed clothing store, and a bull's wool thief was a man who specialized in that kind of burglary. In Harlem, where how a man was draped was a public statement, calling his clothes bull's wool was a judgment on the man.
“He came out of that place in bull's wool and squeaky shoes, and everybody on the corner knew where he had been.”
Origin & Attribution
The phrase begins in British military speech, where bull's wool meant the coarse woollen cloth of an issue uniform. It crossed into American hobo, prison and underworld talk early in the twentieth century, naming the cheap suit a man was handed on release; Jack Black uses it that way in his 1926 memoir You Can't Win and again in Harper's in 1930. By 1933 it is in Ersine's underworld and prison glossary with the tighter sense of stolen clothing, along with the compound bull's wool thief. From there it moved into Black urban speech and into Harlem jive, where Dan Burley uses it in running prose in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive in 1944 with no explanation at all, meaning his readers already had it. This is worth stating plainly, because the term is sometimes presented as a Harlem coinage of the 1940s. It is not. Harlem inherited it from the road and the prison yard and gave it a sharper edge in a place where clothes carried real weight.
1926
Jack Black, You Can't Win — the cheap bullswool suit, in the released-prisoner sense
1930
Jack Black in Harper's describes a man leaving prison in his suit of bull's wool
1933
Ersine's Underworld and Prison Slang defines bullswool as stolen clothing and lists bullswool thief
1944
Dan Burley uses it in jive prose in his Original Handbook of Harlem Jive
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide
Harlem, New York City; earlier across the American hobo, prison, and underworld circuits · 1930s
Spoken by
Hoboes, prisoners and thieves first; then Black urban speakers and Harlem jive writers
$BULLSWThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Historical100 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
30/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1926
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Jack Black, You Can't Win (Macmillan, 1926)
book
■
Jack Black, A Burglar Looks at Laws and Codes, Harper's Magazine vol. CLX (1930)
newspaper
■
Noel Ersine, Underworld and Prison Slang (1933)
glossary
■
Dan Burley, Dan Burley's Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (privately published, New York, 1944)
book
■
+ Cite a sourceVincent J. Monteleone, Criminal Slang, revised edition (1949)
glossary
See also