Entry · catalog no. 0062
wolf tickets
/ /ˌwʊf ˈtɪkɪts/ /WOOF TIK-its
noun phrase · Black urban communities nationally; heavy later life in prison argot and in Baltimore and DC · 1960s
✓ Verified
1.
A threat or challenge issued loudly and in public, with the implication that the speaker may not back it up.
“He been out there all week selling wolf tickets — ain't nobody buying.”
2.
Boasting or bluffing your way through a corner you can't fight your way out of.
“Sold that man a whole book of wolf tickets and walked off clean.”
3.
By extension, any inflated pitch — from a person, an institution, or an advertisement.
“The whole campaign was wolf tickets.”
Origin & Attribution
Black American, and the market metaphor is the whole point: the threat is a ticket, somebody is selling it, and the listener decides whether to buy. It grows out of the older verb woof — loud, boastful, jocular or menacing talk, in Black print since Hurston and Hughes's Mule Bone and in Black college slang by 1934. The phrase itself reaches print in 1963, in a University of Chicago study of Black gang leaders, and the wolf spelling in that paper is very likely white sociologists writing down what they heard as woof. Mainstream write-ups reach for the boy who cried wolf; the barking-dog route through woof is better supported by the record.
1930
Woof appears in Hurston and Hughes's Mule Bone, the ancestor verb in print
1963
First published sell wolf tickets, in a study of Chicago gang leaders
2006
The Wire uses it in the season four finale, fixing its Baltimore association for a national audience
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
Nationwide / diaspora
Black urban communities nationally; heavy later life in prison argot and in Baltimore and DC · 1960s
Spoken by
Black speakers across regions; young men, street and prison contexts, and Black institutional politics — campus, movement, courtroom
$WOLFTIThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Fading63 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
78/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1963
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.
Hear it spoken
By region — how it actually sounds
@auntiereg
Atlanta, GA
@deltasoul
Memphis, TN
Contribute your pronunciation
Citations & Sources
■
James F. Short Jr. and Fred L. Strodtbeck, The Response of Gang Leaders to Status Threats, American Journal of Sociology
1963
■
Afro-American (Baltimore), 10 May
1969
■
Bobby Seale, Seize the Time
1970
■
Edith Folb, Runnin' Down Some Lines
1980
■
Nathan McCall, Makes Me Wanna Holler
1994
■
Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk
1994
■
+ Cite a sourceThe Wire, s4e12, That's Got His Own (HBO)
2006
See also