"sheep in wolf's clothing" meaning in English

See sheep in wolf's clothing in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: sheep in wolves' clothing [plural]
Etymology: Humorous alteration of wolf in sheep's clothing. Head templates: {{en-noun|sheep in wolves' clothing|}} sheep in wolf's clothing (plural sheep in wolves' clothing)
  1. Someone or something that appears fierce or threatening but is actually harmless or means no harm. Categories (lifeform): Sheep, Wolves Synonyms: paper tiger Related terms: one's bark is worse than one's bite, gentle giant

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for sheep in wolf's clothing meaning in English (2.6kB)

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  "etymology_text": "Humorous alteration of wolf in sheep's clothing.",
  "forms": [
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      "form": "sheep in wolves' clothing",
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  "senses": [
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          "word": "wolf in sheep's clothing"
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        {
          "kind": "lifeform",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Sheep",
          "orig": "en:Sheep",
          "parents": [
            "Caprines",
            "Livestock",
            "Even-toed ungulates",
            "Agriculture",
            "Animals",
            "Mammals",
            "Applied sciences",
            "Lifeforms",
            "Vertebrates",
            "Sciences",
            "All topics",
            "Life",
            "Chordates",
            "Fundamental",
            "Nature"
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        },
        {
          "kind": "lifeform",
          "langcode": "en",
          "name": "Wolves",
          "orig": "en:Wolves",
          "parents": [
            "Canids",
            "Carnivores",
            "Mammals",
            "Vertebrates",
            "Chordates",
            "Animals",
            "Lifeforms",
            "All topics",
            "Life",
            "Fundamental",
            "Nature"
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          "source": "w"
        }
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      "examples": [
        {
          "ref": "1910, Douglas English, A Book of Nimble Beasts: Bunny Rabbit, Squirrel, Toad, and “Those Sort of People”, London: Eveleigh Nash, page 221",
          "text": "The hunter-insects, as we have seen, disguise themselves so as to get near their victims unawares, and the hunted disguise themselves very often in the same way so as to avoid being seen, but sometimes in such a way that if they are seen they may appear to be much more terrible creatures than they really are. And so we have the sheep in wolves’ clothing.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
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        "Someone or something that appears fierce or threatening but is actually harmless or means no harm."
      ],
      "id": "en-sheep_in_wolf's_clothing-en-noun-RupTR~xd",
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        [
          "fierce",
          "fierce"
        ],
        [
          "threatening",
          "threatening#Adjective"
        ],
        [
          "harmless",
          "harmless"
        ],
        [
          "harm",
          "harm"
        ]
      ],
      "related": [
        {
          "word": "one's bark is worse than one's bite"
        },
        {
          "word": "gentle giant"
        }
      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "paper tiger"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "sheep in wolf's clothing"
}
{
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      "form": "sheep in wolves' clothing",
      "tags": [
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      "args": {
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  "lang_code": "en",
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  "related": [
    {
      "word": "one's bark is worse than one's bite"
    },
    {
      "word": "gentle giant"
    }
  ],
  "senses": [
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          "word": "wolf in sheep's clothing"
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          "ref": "1910, Douglas English, A Book of Nimble Beasts: Bunny Rabbit, Squirrel, Toad, and “Those Sort of People”, London: Eveleigh Nash, page 221",
          "text": "The hunter-insects, as we have seen, disguise themselves so as to get near their victims unawares, and the hunted disguise themselves very often in the same way so as to avoid being seen, but sometimes in such a way that if they are seen they may appear to be much more terrible creatures than they really are. And so we have the sheep in wolves’ clothing.",
          "type": "quotation"
        }
      ],
      "glosses": [
        "Someone or something that appears fierce or threatening but is actually harmless or means no harm."
      ],
      "links": [
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          "Someone",
          "someone"
        ],
        [
          "something",
          "something"
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          "appear"
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        [
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      ],
      "synonyms": [
        {
          "word": "paper tiger"
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "word": "sheep in wolf's clothing"
}

This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.