out of sight, out of mind
Meaning
Usage frequency
Most common · 101 corpus occurrences
Recorded for “Out of sight, out of mind” in COCA, searched on 2016-10-04.
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
“The files got archived and — out of sight, out of mind — nobody touched them again.”
When to use it
Can describe forgotten tasks or possessions, or comment on a relationship weakened by absence.
The image behind the saying
A proverb: what the eye cannot see, the mind stops thinking about.