Word.ws English Dictionary

Wood family

Wood family proper noun: empty seats at a theater, circus, etc., corresponding to tickets that the venue failed to sell.

Proper noun

the Wood family

  1. (humorous, slang) Empty seats at a theater, circus, etc., corresponding to tickets that the venue failed to sell.
    • In spite of their efforts to avoid it, members of the "Wood Family" were constantly in evidence. In the slang of the circus, the phrase simply meant empty seats.1958, Reginald Taylor, Circus Triumphant, page 177
    • […] we trucked last week's show sixteen miles to the coastal village of Lynton for a single performance in the village hall, a performance attended largely by the “Wood Family”—theatrical gallows humor for the rows of empty wooden seats.2010, Ivor Noël Hume, A Passion for the Past: The Odyssey of a Transatlantic Archaeologist

Origin of Wood family

A pun on wood, the material that may be seen when benches are empty.

Questions about Wood family

What does Wood family mean?
Wood family means empty seats at a theater, circus, etc., corresponding to tickets that the venue failed to sell.
What part of speech is Wood family?
Wood family is a proper noun.

Words near Wood family in the dictionary

  1. wood elf
  2. wood elves
  3. Wood End
  4. wood engraving
  5. wood engravings
  6. Wood family
  7. wood fern
  8. wood ferns
  9. wood finishing
  10. wood finishings
  11. wood flour

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Wood family (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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