wooden nickel

Noun

wooden nickel (plural wooden nickels)

1. A wooden token that is manufactured and distributed by a particular business as an advertising gimmick or which can be exchanged for goods, many of which have now become collector's items.
   • Your Rivermont wooden nickel has tremendous purchasing power! Every customer on our mailing list has received a Rivermont wooden nickel.1960, The Orchid Digest - Volume 24, page 417
   • A wooden nickel can be round or rectangular, and if round, of any size from a nickel or smaller up to a dollar or larger .1978, Carl Allenbaugh, Robert M. Poeschl, Coins: Questions and Answers, page 159

   Synonyms:

   wooden nutmeg

2. (US) The smallest amount of money imaginable.
   • His patients, on the other hand, were precisely such people as recognized that without self-understanding, without direction, without health of the inner as of the outer man, life was not worth a wooden nickel.1961, Clara Winston, The Hours Together: A Novel, page 31
   • Renounce all personal pleasures and personal profit. It is all just pennies—or, as my young friend Julia would say, it's a wooden nickel.1981, The Little Lamp - Volumes 21-23, page 57
3. A worthless replica of a coin, usually intended to defraud.
   • Don't take any wooden nickels warned innocents going abroad to steer clear of con artists.2008, Rosemarie Ostler, Let's Talk Turkey, page 66
   • In fact, Dave Ferrie had laughed about Robert's scheme to cheat the transit system, giving me a wooden nickel so I'd always “have some change” that Robert couldn't stash away.2011, Judyth Baker, Jim Marrs, Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald
4. (figuratively) Something that purports to be something other than it actually is, especially that purports to be more valuable than it actually is.
   • Another wooden nickel would be a husband returning totally on his terms, where his terms are that you do not deal with the relationship.1993, Donald R. Harvey, When the One You Love Wants to Leave, page 149
   • The Illusionist recasts the Brandon story in Sparta, New York, and makes the Brandon character into an amateur magician who picks up women in the Wooden Nickel bar; the novel insists, in other words, that since Dean Lily is only a counterfeit man, “a wooden nickel,” he must seduce his unknowing...2005, J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, page 62