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 bad, including its inflections. Clear word filter
27 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Old habits die hard
Matching variant: Old bad habits die hard
Any publicity is good publicity
Matching variant: Even bad publicity is good publicity
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree
Matching variant: The bad apple doesn't fall far from the tree
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
There's no such thing as bad publicity
Bad news travels fast
Hard cases make bad law
You have to take the bad with the good
A bad penny always comes back
One bad apple spoils the barrel
There is no such thing as a bad child
There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing
Three removes is as bad as a fire
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used