Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Four Noble Truths are dukkha, samudaya, nirodha, and marga. They state that transient existence is unsatisfactory and painful, that craving arises together with this pain, that the craving can be confined or let go, and that the Noble Eightfold Path leads to release from dukkha.
Dukkha is the first of the Four Noble Truths and is most commonly translated as suffering, though Khantipalo calls that translation incorrect. It refers to the ultimately unsatisfactory nature of temporary states and things, and according to Emmanuel is better translated as pain, the opposite of the non-transient pleasure called sukha. The term derives from dush-stha, standing unstable.
The Four Noble Truths are traditionally identified as the first teaching the Buddha gave after his awakening, presented in the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta. According to L. S. Cousins many scholars hold that this discourse was identified as the first sermon only at a later date, and Carol S. Anderson argues the four truths may originally not have been part of the sutta but were added in some versions.
The Pali phrase ariya sacca, Sanskrit arya satya, is rendered as noble truths by a convention started by the earliest English translators. Paul Williams argues it could equally mean the nobles' truths or the truths of the noble ones, and K. R. Norman judges the best translation to be the truth of the noble one, the Buddha.
By about the fifth century CE the four truths grew to central importance in Theravada Buddhism, which holds that insight into them is liberating in itself. They are less prominent in the Mahayana traditions, which emphasize insight into Śūnyatā and the Bodhisattva path, and which reinterpreted the truths to explain how a liberated being can remain pervasively operative in the world.
Beginning with 19th century British missionaries who studied the texts, the four truths were popularized in the west, which Carol S. Anderson links to the colonial project of gaining control over Buddhism. Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught used them as a framework, and Gimello describes this so-called Protestant Buddhism as created in nearly diametrical opposition to traditional Theravada practice.