better late than never
Meaning
Usage frequency
Common · 92 corpus occurrences
Recorded for “Better late than never” in COCA, searched on 2016-04-18.
About these frequency groups
Groups use full-form occurrence counts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), recorded in 2016–2017. For a proverb with several forms, we use the highest individual count, since adding overlapping forms could count the same occurrence twice.
These are historical American English corpus counts, not estimates of how often everyone uses a saying today. A zero means no full-form match was recorded. The source’s separate familiarity ratings are retained in the data but do not determine this ordering.
We grouped variants, merged reviewed duplicate entries, and preserved existing editorial wording. The source includes historical and dated sayings; inclusion is not an endorsement.
In a conversation
“He finally apologised after a year, but better late than never.”
When to use it
Can express relief that something finally happened, sometimes with mild criticism of the delay.
The image behind the saying
The proverb states its comparison directly: delayed action still has more value than no action at all.