To cry wolf is to raise a false alarm, and particularly to do so more than once, so that when a real danger finally appears nobody believes the warning. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the idiom plainly as meaning “to give a false alarm”. The Oxford English Dictionary glosses it more fully as making false claims, with the result that later true claims are disbelieved. The phrase is used of anyone whose repeated exaggerations or scares have worn out their credibility, whether that is a person, an organisation or a piece of equipment.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘cry wolf’?
The phrase comes directly from one of Aesop’s fables, catalogued as number 210 in the Perry Index, usually known in English as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. In the story a shepherd boy amuses himself by shouting that a wolf is attacking his flock, bringing villagers running each time for nothing. When a wolf genuinely appears, his cries are ignored and the flock is lost.
The fable entered English through William Caxton’s 1484 printed translation of Aesop’s Fables, the same book credited with introducing “sour grapes” into the language. From that story the shorthand “to cry wolf” passed into everyday speech as a way of describing anyone who raises alarms so often that a real one goes unheeded.
The moral has proved lasting well beyond storytelling. Researchers in various fields have connected the idiom to what is now called alarm fatigue, the tendency for people to stop reacting properly to warnings, whether from smoke detectors, security systems or medical monitors, once those warnings have sounded too often without real cause. The fable’s simple point, that credibility can be spent and is not easily replaced, has made “cry wolf” a common way of describing that failure in fields Aesop never imagined.