The Lion's Share

Another Aesop's fable, and one with a harsher original meaning than people usually assume. In the story, several animals hunt together and agree beforehand to split whatever they catch equally. Once the kill is made, the lion claims the first portion because he's king, the second because he's a partner in the hunt, the third because he's the strongest, and warns that anyone who touches the fourth portion will regret it. In the original fable, "the lion's share" doesn't mean the biggest slice, it means all of it, with nothing left for anyone else. Like several other Aesop-derived idioms, it reached English through William Caxton's 1484 translation, and only softened over time into meaning "the majority" rather than "everything."