Contextualizebeta

cry wolf

verb

Etymology

From the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf, where a little boy amuses himself by repeatedly crying "wolf" to see the panic he causes in the community, but is consequently ignored when he tries to alert them to a real wolf.

Definitions

  1. To raise a false alarm

    To raise a false alarm; to constantly warn others about an imagined threat, thereby failing to get assistance when a real threat appears.

    • The politicians would cry wolf at the slightest provocation so when the real threat appeared no one believed them.
    • The newspaper placards that had cried "wolf!" so often, cried "wolf!" now in vain.
    • […]and the critical sense of the professors counts for little, for they cry wolf too often[…]

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for cry wolf. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA