‘Off the hook’ has led three quite separate lives. In its oldest sense it means freed from difficulty, blame or an unwanted obligation, as a fish that slips the hook is freed. Applied to a telephone it means the receiver is not resting on its cradle, so no calls can get through, and a phone that is ‘ringing off the hook’ is ringing incessantly. In American slang from the late 1990s onwards, something ‘off the hook’ is excellent, wild or outrageously good.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘off the hook’?
The oldest sense comes from angling. A fish that takes the bait is on the hook and as good as caught; one that wriggles free is off the hook, and by the mid nineteenth century both halves of that picture were being applied to people. Anthony Trollope has it in The Small House at Allington (1864). John Eames, reading a friend’s news of an ill-advised engagement, reacts: “Poor Caudle!” he said to himself; “he’s hooked, and he’ll never get himself off the hook again.” Marriage, in Eames’s view, was the landing net. The everyday escape sense, freeing someone from blame or an unwelcome duty, is covered in its own right at let someone off the hook.
Keep this separate from the much older ‘off the hooks’, which meant ‘out of sorts’ or ‘unhinged’ from the sixteenth century and, by the 1840s, ‘dead’. Trollope used that one too, in the same novel: “Where will John be when the governor goes off the hooks?”, that is, when his father dies. The hooks there are probably the ones a door or gate hangs on, hence ‘unhinged’, rather than anything to do with fishing.
The telephone sense is the literal one. On early wall sets the receiver hung on a hook that worked the switch, so a receiver left off the hook held the line open and nobody could ring you: hence deliberately unreachable. American English later added ‘ringing off the hook’ for a phone ringing without let-up, the image being of a bell so insistent it shakes the receiver from its rest.
The newest sense is American slang, in which a party, a track or a performance that is off the hook is outstandingly good. It came out of hip-hop and Black American youth slang. The earliest citation in Green’s Dictionary of Slang is a late 1990s teen glossary defining it as “Happening; incredibly cool and hip”. Nobody has pinned down the image behind it: the busy telephone of something so in demand it rings off the hook, the fishmonger’s fish so fresh it is straight off the hook, or, as its sibling ‘off the chain’ suggests, a dog loosed and running wild. Take your pick; the dictionaries decline to.