Meaning
To abandon or sacrifice someone to hostile critics, enemies, or danger, usually withdrawing protection in order to save yourself or deflect blame. Implies betrayal by people who could have defended the victim. Current in British and American English. Dramatic and accusatory; carries a strong implication of betrayal by those who owed loyalty or cover. Regional use: General English.
Origin
No origin is verified. The standard dictionary account (the American Heritage idiom note, republished at Dictionary.com) says the phrase comes from an Aesopic fable in which a nurse threatens to throw a misbehaving child to the wolves - an empty threat - and dates the idiom's first recorded use to the first half of the 1900s. Folk stories of Russian or Polish sleigh passengers casting someone to pursuing wolves are often offered as the source, and Willa Cather dramatized such a scene in My Antonia (1918), but there is no evidence these tales created the English phrase, which is attested before Cather's novel. The idiom belongs with older hyperbolic formulas such as 'throw to the dogs' and 'throw to the lions', and its documented rise is in early twentieth-century political journalism. The Aesop derivation itself is a traditional attribution rather than a demonstrable source.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- feed someone to the wolves
- throw them to the wolves
- thrown to the wolves
Usage Examples
- When the scandal broke, the ministry threw the junior official to the wolves rather than admit the policy had failed.
- The label dropped the band without a statement, effectively throwing them to the wolves online.
- I refused to throw my co-author to the wolves and signed the joint correction myself.