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The greater part or most of something, as in Whenever they won a doubles match, Ethel claimed the lion's share of the credit, or As usual, Uncle Bob took the lion's share of the cake. This expression alludes to Aesop's fable about a lion, who got all of a kill because its fellow hunters, an ass, fox, and wolf, were afraid to claim their share. [Late 1700s]
The Lion's Share is an expression that has come to mean the larger of two amounts, or more often, the largest of several amounts.
The saying derives from one of Aesop's fables, where the term is actually defined as the complete amount (all of it).
In the fable, a lion, fox, jackal and wolf go hunting, successfully killing a deer. It is divided into four parts with the lion taking the first quarter because he is king of the beasts, the second quarter because he is the arbiter of which animals get what portions of the deer, the third quarter because of his help in catching the deer, and the fourth quarter for his superior strength.
In some variants of the fable, the lion only takes three-quarters of the deer and lets the other animals fight over the remaining quarter.
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 | Idioms. The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer. Copyright © 1997 by The Christine Ammer 1992 Trust. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Lion's Share". Read more |
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