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 thing, including its inflections. Clear word filter
78 entries
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
There's no such thing as true love
They don't make things like they used to
Things without remedy should be without regard
Whether you think you can or not, you are right
Matching variant: Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right
You can never do merely one thing
You never know what you have till it's gone
Matching variant: You don't know a good thing till it's gone