WThe Big Bad Wolf is a fictional wolf appearing in several cautionary tales that include some of Grimms' Fairy Tales. Versions of this character have appeared in numerous works, and it has become a generic archetype of a menacing predatory antagonist.
WThe 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.
WThe Dog and the Wolf is one of Aesop's Fables, numbered 346 in the Perry Index. It has been popular since antiquity as an object lesson of how freedom should not be exchanged for comfort or financial gain. An alternative fable with the same moral concerning different animals is less well known.
WHomo homini lupus, or in its unabridged form Homo homini lupus est, is a Latin proverb meaning "A man is a wolf to another man," or more tersely "Man is wolf to man." It has meaning in reference to situations where people are known to have behaved in a way comparably in nature to a wolf. The wolf as a creature is thought, in this example, to have qualities of being predatory, cruel, inhuman i.e. more like an animal than civilized.
W"Throw to the wolves" is an English metaphorical idiom, meaning to sacrifice someone to save or benefit oneself or one's group. "Throw under the bus" is a more modern equivalent. "Throw to the wolves" is also sometimes used more generally to describe abandoning someone for any reason, cognate with "throw to the lions" and "throw to the dogs", which also derive from the supposedly man-eating appetites of a beast, or "kick to the curb".
WThe Wolf and the Crane is a fable attributed to Aesop that has several eastern analogues. Similar stories have a lion instead of a wolf, and a stork, heron or partridge takes the place of the crane.
WThe Wolf and the Lamb is a well-known fable of Aesop and is numbered 155 in the Perry Index. There are several variant stories of tyrannical injustice in which a victim is falsely accused and killed despite a reasonable defence.
W"The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats" is a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in Grimm's Fairy Tales. It is of Aarne-Thompson type 123.