The Boy Who Cried Wolf

For other uses, see The Boy Who Cried Wolf (disambiguation).
Francis Barlow's illustration of the fable, 1687

The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index.[1] From it is derived the English idiom "to cry wolf", defined as "to give a false alarm" in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable[2] and glossed by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.[3]

  1. ^ "151. The Boy Who Cried 'Wolf' (Laura Gibbs, translator)". mythfolklore.net.
  2. ^ The Concise Dictionary...(Cassel Publications 1992)
  3. ^ "wolf". Compact Oxford English Dictionary. askoxford.com. OUP. June 2005. Archived from the original on December 1, 2008. Retrieved 19 September 2007.