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
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
God made dirt, dirt don't hurt
Home is what we make it
Hope deferred makes the heart sick
Humility makes great men twice honorable
If you don't make mistakes, you don't make anything
It is difference of opinion that makes horse races
It takes a heap of living to make a house a home
It takes two to make a bargain
It takes two to make a couple
It takes two to make love
It takes two to quarrel
Matching variant: It takes two to make a quarrel