Word.ws English Dictionary

woolly back

woolly back noun: a non-Liverpudlian person who travels to Liverpool, especially to work at the docks.

Noun

woolly back (plural woolly backs)

  1. (historical, Liverpool slang) A non-Liverpudlian person who travels to Liverpool, especially to work at the docks.
  2. (derogatory, Liverpool slang) A person from the Merseyside area surrounding Liverpool such as Skelmersdale, Southport, Halton, and the Wirral.
  3. (UK, slang) Any unsophisticated person from the countryside.
  4. (US, slang) A Welsh person.
  5. (US, slang) A New Zealander.

Synonyms of woolly back

Forms of woolly back

pluralwoolly backs
alternative formwooley back
alternative formwoollyback
alternative formwoolyback

Origin of woolly back

The Liverpool Echo suggests two possible origins for the term, both dating back to the early 1900s: * It may be a term for scab workers brought into the city from surrounding towns to manually load and unload ships in the Liverpool docks; unloading ships, the dockers would carry the woollen bales on their backs, leaving wool on their clothes. * It may be a term for men who delivered coal into Liverpool from mines surrounding the city, who wore sheep fleece to protect their backs. Another suggestion is that it could have originated in the Middle Ages from non-resident Welsh and English people trying to avoid the entry fee at the Chester city walls on market day by sneaking in the livestock entrance with a sheep on their back.

Questions about woolly back

What does woolly back mean?
Woolly back means a non-Liverpudlian person who travels to Liverpool, especially to work at the docks.
What part of speech is woolly back?
Woolly back is a noun.
What is the plural of woolly back?
The plural of woolly back is woolly backs.

Words near woolly back in the dictionary

  1. woolly
  2. woolly adelgid
  3. woolly adelgids
  4. woolly aphid
  5. woolly aphids
  6. woolly back
  7. woolly backs
  8. woolly bear
  9. woolly bear caterpillar
  10. woolly bear caterpillars
  11. woolly bears

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: woolly back (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-woolly back.ogg.

Cite this entry: “woolly back.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/woolly_back. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.