<P> The Boy Who Cried Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 210 in the Perry Index . 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 . </P> <P> The tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly tricks nearby villagers into thinking wolves are attacking his flock . When a wolf actually does appear and the boy again calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm and the sheep are eaten by the wolf . In later English - language poetic versions of the fable, the wolf also eats the boy . This happens in Fables for five year olds (1830) by John Hookham Frere, in William Ellery Leonard's Aesop & Hyssop (1912), and in his interpretation of Aesop's Fables (1965) by Louis Untermeyer . </P> <P> The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is, "this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them". It echoes a statement attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laërtius in his The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, in which the sage was asked what those who tell lies gain by it and he answered "that when they speak truth they are not believed". William Caxton similarly closes his version with the remark that "men bileve not lyghtly hym whiche is knowen for a lyer". </P>

What's the story of the boy who cried wolf
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