Meaning
To deceive or hoodwink someone, especially by preventing them from noticing what is really going on; to trick a person so they cannot see the truth. Standard in both British and American English, though American in origin. Informal; implies sustained, cheeky deception and some gullibility on the part of the deceived party. Regional use: American English in origin; now General English.
Origin
This is an Americanism of the early nineteenth century. Wordorigins traces the earliest known use to the Vermont Gazette (Bennington) of 11 November 1828, describing a political stratagem 'to pull the wool over their eyes', with a further citation from the Pittsfield Sun (Massachusetts) in 1835 ('to pull the wool over your eyes, to gull you, to pick your pockets'); The Phrase Finder independently cites the People's Press of Gettysburg in November 1835. The popular explanation is that the 'wool' is a powdered wool wig pulled down over the wearer's eyes to blindfold them, and both sources mention it, but both flag the chronological difficulty: wig-wearing had largely died out in America by the time the phrase was recorded, and The Phrase Finder concludes bluntly that the real derivation is unknown ('Well, we don't know'). A simpler possibility, since 'wool' was long used informally for human hair, is that the phrase just means pulling someone's hair over their eyes. The wig story should be treated as a widely repeated guess rather than established fact.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- have the wool pulled over one's eyes
- pull the wool over our eyes
- pull the wool over the public's eyes
Usage Examples
- The accountant had been pulling the wool over the board's eyes for three years with fabricated quarterly figures.
- Don't let the salesman pull the wool over your eyes with talk of free upgrades and lifetime warranties.
- Voters saw through the scheme the second time; the wool couldn't be pulled over their eyes again.