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 one, including its inflections. Clear word filter
88 entries
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
All the good ones are taken
Anger is never without reason but seldom with a good one
First impressions are lasting
Matching variant: First impressions are lasting ones
In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
Life is a bitch, and then you marry one
Life is just one damn thing after another
No man can serve two masters
Matching variant: One cannot serve two masters
No one is born a racist
No one wins a war
One bad apple spoils the barrel
One man's loss is another man's gain
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin
Progress comes in small steps
Matching variant: Progress comes one step at a time
The best way to rob a bank is to own one
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
A dead fish can float downstream, but it takes a live one to swim upstream
A rooster one day and a feather duster the next
Dance as if no one is watching
Don't put all your eggs in one basket
Don't wash your dirty linen in public
Matching variant: One does not wash one's dirty linen in public