The wolf whistle has gone from crude to complimentary to crude again, depending on one's point of view. It can be sexy when Bogart whistles to Bacall, funny in a cartoon, and menacing on the street. The practice of wolf whistling is dying out even among catcallers these days. But where did it come from in the first place? There's a clue in the name itself.
“My theory I got from talking to an old shepherd,” says John Lucas, author of A Brief History of Whistling. “He was this very knowledgeable guy, trained sheepdogs, and he ran through a whole bunch of calls with me and did one that sounded exactly like a wolf whistle. I said, ‘Christ, that’s a bit politically incorrect!’ and he said, ‘No, it’s kosher, it’s from Albania’.”
The shepherd explained that in mountainous parts of Southern Europe, shepherds have for centuries used the whistle to warn each other, and their dogs, when wolves appeared. They’d put two or three fingers in their mouths, then blow those notes. “It’s an incredible carrying whistle, unbelievably noisy,” Lucas says, “You’d hear it for miles.” Both the technique and the tune seem to have been called wolf whistling.
What really popularized the wolf whistle as a signal to women were the cartoons of Tex Avery. Read about Avery's cartoons and the entire history of the wolf whistle at BBC Culture.