keep the wolf from the door
To ward off poverty or hunger.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
“He works two jobs just to keep the wolf from the door.”
“During the difficult economic crisis, her small salary was barely enough to keep the wolf from the door.”
“Despite the meager wages earned from his seasonal labor, he managed to keep the wolf from the door throughout the long, unforgiving winter.”
first recorded 15th c. disputed origin
The expression is recorded as early as 1470, though the original phrasing appears to have been to keep the wolf from the gate. By the 1500s, the wolf had evidently moved closer, and the idiom shifted to its modern form of keeping the wolf from the door. A quotation from 1645 indicates the phrase had by then settled into its current sense of maintaining a basic level of subsistence to avoid starvation.
The origin is disputed, with some scholars suggesting the phrase may be a loan from French or German constructions. The French *manger comme un loup*, or to eat like a wolf, and the German *Wolfsmagen*, literally meaning a wolf’s stomach and denoting a keen appetite, are cited as possible linguistic ancestors. The wolf serves as a convenient, if somewhat dramatic, stand-in for the hunger that arrives when one’s resources are exhausted.
- 01
bang down the door
To present oneself as a strong candidate for a role or achievement, explicitly or implicitly.
- 02
blow the doors off
To be much more important or impressive than.
- 03
close the stable door after the horse has bolted
To attempt to prevent a problem that has already occurred; to design and implement a preventive mechanism that is too late (after the first failure instead of before).
- 04
cobbler, keep to your last
One should not criticise matters outside one's field of expertise; one should mind one's business.
- 05
cry wolf
To raise a false alarm; to constantly warn others about an imagined threat, thereby failing to get assistance when a real threat appears.
- 06
darken a church door
To go to church to attend a service.
- 07
darken someone's door
To arrive at someone's residence or location, especially as an unexpected visitor.
- 08
don't let the door hit you on the way out
Used as a command to leave in haste, or to indicate that one is glad, or at least unmoved, to see the addressed person leaving.
Last updated August 10, 2026