The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly fools villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town's flock. 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 and glossed by the Oxford English Dictionary as meaning to make false claims, with the result that subsequent true claims are disbelieved.
The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index. Francis Barlow's illustration of the fable, 1687 For other uses, see The Boy Who Cried Wolf (disambiguation).
