Wide boy is a British term for a man who lives by his wits, wheeling and dealing. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it is synonymous with spiv. The word "wide" is in this sense means wide-awake or sharp-witted. Newspapers of the late 1940s and 1950s often use both terms in the same article about the same person when dealing with ticket touts, fraudsters and black market traders. It has become more generally used to describe a dishonest trader or a petty criminal who works by guile rather than force.
The word came to public attention in 1937 with the publication of Wide Boys Never Work by Robert Westerby, a novel about gamblers and hustlers. During World War II such individuals became involved in the black market, but the term only began to appear in newspapers from 1947.
Read more about Wide Boy: Fictional Portrayals, Musical References, Other Usage
Famous quotes containing the words wide and/or boy:
“Fly-catchers of the moon,
Our hands are blenched, our fingers seem
But slender needles of bone;
Blenched by that malicious dream
They are spread wide that each
May rend what comes in reach.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all beasts;” and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, “A boy is better unborn than untaught.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)