Where did he grow up?
We both grew up in Oklahoma, but different parts of the state. He grew up in he northeast region, and I in the southern region.
I was mocked once in high school for not pronouncing the* l.* Up to that point I had always thought it was supposed to be elided, like would & could. Sometimes I feel like I’m from some parallel world with minor differences…
ETA: Yes, I’m the only one who picked “woof” in the poll. I’m from southwest Missouri, but so were the kids that mocked me for saying “woof.” :shrug:
I say woof. I’m trying to break the habit for the sake of my SO who didn’t grow up in these parts and is somewhere between horrified and amused. It’s not a word that comes up often in conversation so it isn’t an easy quirk to change 
You and me, foolsguinea. You and me.
Um . . . that’s because you’re talking about two entirely different words. We’re not talking about the actual word “woof,” like a dog bark.
I say “wolf”, my dad says “woof”. He’s from Rome, NY. I can’t remember if the plural for him is “woofs” or “wooves” but even as a kid I thought it was funny.
Yes, I meant to ask, for those of you who say “woof,” how do you pronounce the plural?
Some children who are still learning pluralization rules say “woofs,” and adults generally say “wooves.”
That is, they say wolves, just like everyone else, and elide the “l” to a greater or lesser degree. I suspect that some of the people voting in the majority on the poll actually don’t enunciate the letter as fully as they think.
South Carolina, and I say “woof” unless I try very hard. I think my dad is actually incapable of saying it with the “l” - he’s from south Georgia.
ETA - you should hear me and my boyfriend when bathrooms come up and he has no idea if I think we need new tiles or new towels.
I pronounce it “woolf” as in Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
When we don’t pronounce it “P.A.” Hell, we were using that abbreviation before the Post Office made it official.
I tend to pronounce “wolf” as if it were spelled “wulf” or “woolf”. I don’t know if that’s different from what the OP meant by “wolf” in the poll. I read that as “wolf” pronounced with the vowel of “dolt”.
“wolf” but with a swallowed “L.” There’s a definite difference between “wolf” and “woof” but the “L” is nowhere near as pronounced as it could be. I got it from my dad for whom the words “oreo” and “oriole” are homonyms.
I say the “l”, as do most people I know. But the non-l pronunciation happens around here too.
[aside]I used to know a dog named “Woofen”, who was named because a friend of the owner was going on about the movie “Wolven” at about the same time the dog was acquired. The owner got so tickled with the pronunciation that she used it as the name of her dog.[/aside]
On review - I do often use a bit of a swallowed “L”, though. It’s definitely not “woof”, but it’s not a fully-pronounced L, either.
Wolf. /wʊlf/
Where I grew up, just outside London (the estuary accent you hear all over TV) it’d be wɒwf.
When I say “wolf,” I think there’s an L in there, but I know it’s a swallowed sort of L and probably sounds more like “woof.” As if it were spelled (w) (u) (very small l) (f).
When I say “wolves,” the L comes through a lot more.
homophones, not homonyms:smack:
My parents both say “woof” and they grew up in rural towns in the west. I just picture it as a rural thing, like “crick” for creek and “ruf” for “roof”. Their accents are both pretty standard American Midwest but there are a few words that are different. You should hear my mother completely mangle “hormone.” giggle
I do say wolf with the l, however, no matter how I was raised. I was also raised saying “pop” and I’ve trained myself to say “soda.”
In North Dakota “wolf” rhymes with “roof,” as Miss Woodhouse says, but I never heard “creek” pronounced as “crick.” When I lived in California I was mocked into learning to insert the “l” in “wolf.”
I’m from Philly, as SE as you can get in Pennsylvania and I have never heard “woof”, not that I noticed.
That’s your problem. 
I pronounce the L in ‘wolf’, but lived in Pennsylvania long enough that I heard many people omit it. Or was that in Ohio? Hmm…
Today I read a Facebook status that referred to ‘woofing’ down one’s food. That’s the best eggcorn I’ve seen today.