DCHP-1 Online

wild-and-woolly † 

• adj. characterized by uncouth, untamed behavior.

  • The term woolly has been variously accounted for. One view is that many pioneers wore sheepskin coats with the wool out, thus earning the epithet; another is offered in the 1910 quote below.

  • 1900  The . . . wolfer . . . was . . . about as rough and tough a customer as one could have hoped not to meet anywhere in the wildest and wooliest parts of the west.
  • 1903  (1913)  Breaking the wild and woolly bronco is thrilling, and he needs no other tonic. . . .
  • 1910  [The Padre contends that the West is called "woolly" because of our storms, and urges, in defence of his opinion, that in Alaska the winds are called "woollies."]
  • 1914  Nearly fifty years ago a young Presbyterian minister, James Robertson, born 1839, swore that, God helping him, he would never allow the Canadian Prairie to become a "wild and woolly West."
  • 1958  While the colony on Vancouver Island was law-abiding, the miners . . . were a wild and wooly bunch of extroverts.