wooden nickel

English

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 wooden nickels have now become collector's items.
   • 1960, The Orchid Digest - Volume 24, page 417:

     Your Rivermont wooden nickel has tremendous purchasing power! Every customer on our mailing list has received a Rivermont wooden nickel.

   • 1978, Carl Allenbaugh, Robert M. Poeschl, Coins: Questions and Answers, page 159:

     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 .

   • 1986, Sentinel - Volumes 22-24, page 21:

     In a coin catalogue, recently came across a wooden nickel issued it Cape Parry . On one side is an Indian's head and the words ' wooden nickel '. On the other side is ' Cape Parry Dewline'.

   • 1998, Jim Feldbush, Nancy Beck Irland, Carolyn Sutton, Eye-openers:

     It took quite some time to collect enough wooden nickels to equal anything of value. And what many customers didn't realize was that everything in the "wooden nickel" stores was priced higher than anywhere else.

   • 2011, Kenneth Bertholf Jr., Don Dorflinger, Blairstown and Its Neighbors:

     One of the souvenirs of the time was the traditional wooden nickel, actually made of thin balsa and redeemable for cash at the Blairstown Press office.

2. (US) The smallest amount of money imaginable.
   • 1961, Clara Winston, The Hours Together: A Novel, page 31:

     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.

   • 1981, The Little Lamp - Volumes 21-23, page 57:

     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.

   • 2003, Sandra Dallas, The Chili Queen:

     I wouldn't be in your shoes for a wooden nickel.

   • 2014, John B. Severance, Fortune Found, page 105:

     Captain sure knew he was taking on two inexperienced greenhorns to round out the ship's full complement of eighteen men, officers and able seamen, and it wasn't costing him so much as a wooden nickel.

   • 2015, Lynda Mullaly Hunt, Fish in a Tree, page 24:

     I think of Grandpa and Dad, who always asked us if we were having a silver dollar day or a wooden nickel one.

3. A worthless replica of a coin, usually intended to defraud.
   • 2008, Rosemarie Ostler, Let's Talk Turkey, page 66:

     Don't take any wooden nickels warned innocents going abroad to steer clear of con artists.

   • 2011, Judyth Baker, Jim Marrs, Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald:

     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.

   • 2014, Marcia Evanick, Harbor Nights:

     Wendell's goodhearted chuckle was as fake as a wooden nickel.

   • 2015, Robert Asprin, Linda Evans, Tales of the Time Scouts:

     The rest of the report was nothing more than innuendo and slander, none of it provable and every word of it calculated to wreck any chance he had at conning a single tourist watching that broadcast out of so much as a wooden nickel.

4. Something that purports to be something other than it actually is, especially that purports to be more valuable than it actually is.
   • 1993, Donald R. Harvey, When the One You Love Wants to Leave, page 149:

     Another wooden nickel would be a husband returning totally on his terms, where his terms are that you do not deal with the relationship.

   • 2005, J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, page 62:

     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 heterosexual partners by using a deadly combination of charm and magic.

   • 2005, Tabor Evans, Longarm and the Horses of a Different Color:

     The crooks who stuck him with a mysterious horse of another color and a phoney bill of sale never told him they'd slipped him a wooden nickel, or a horse he'd never be able to sell.

   • 2009, Betina Krahn, Sweet Talking Man: A Novel:

     He can't be trusted. Didn't you hear the awful Irish accent he put on when he was staring at you? He's a wooden nickel, for sure.

   • 2013, Sereena Nightshade, Black Market, page 231:

     No one's perfect even if you believe I am seeking perfection and love, when real, and not just a wooden nickel, is not always something one wears on one's sleeve like a cheap arm patch bought at the second hand store.

Synonyms

• wooden nutmeg

Derived terms

• don't take any wooden nickels