English in everyday life
Proverbs
Explore English sayings from most to least frequent in a published American English corpus. Alternate forms are collected together.
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.
Expressions containing make, including its inflections. Clear word filter
104 entries
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Well-behaved women rarely make history
Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise
God doesn't make junk
If you can't make it here, you can't make it anywhere
Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses
Promises are made to be broken
Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade
Fine feathers make fine birds
Heroes are made, not born
It takes all sorts to make a world
It takes two to make a deal
Money makes money
Necessity never made a good bargain
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin
Poets are born, not made
The love you take is equal to the love you make
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used