throw to the wolves

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Idioms and Phrases

Also, throw to the dogs or lions . Send to a terrible fate; sacrifice someone, especially so as to save oneself. For example, Leaving him with hostile reporters was throwing him to the wolves , or If Bob doesn't perform as they expect, they'll throw him to the lions . All three hyperbolic terms allude to the ravenous appetite of these animals, which presumably will devour the victim. The first term comes from Aesop's fable about a nurse who threatens to throw her charge to the wolves if the child does not behave. [First half of 1900s]

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Example Sentences

Examples have not been reviewed.

At a lavish White House dinner staged to mollify one of his harshest Democratic critics, William Randolph Hearst, FDR said that to fight communism and “similar crackpot ideas, it may be necessary to throw to the wolves the forty-six men who are reported to have incomes in excess of one million dollars. This can be accomplished through taxation.”

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When packing his Budget a wise Chancellor of the Exchequer always includes some little tit-bit that he can throw to the wolves if they become too insistent.

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�� is deplorable, however, is that our own people should be misled by one-sided accounts, and that they should throw to the wolves a man who was serving his country in a post of anxiety and danger, with such responsibility upon him as few could ever have endured.

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

throw together throw up

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