good fences make good neighbours
Meaning
Clear boundaries between people keep their relationship peaceful.
Well-defined limits prevent disputes between neighbours.
Usage frequency
Common · 35 corpus occurrences
Recorded for “Good fences make good neighbors” in COCA, searched on 2016-11-29.
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
“We never argue about the garden because both sides keep to the boundary — good fences make good neighbours.”
When to use it
Used to argue that clear boundaries, privacy, or property lines help people get along. Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" (1914) popularized the saying, often quoting it with a gentle irony about whether every wall is really needed.
The image behind the saying
A fence marks the exact boundary between two properties, so neither neighbour drifts into the other's space; clear, agreed limits are pictured preventing the small arguments that blurry lines cause.