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 breed, including its inflections. Clear word filter
11 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
A little neglect may breed great mischief
Money makes money
Matching variant: Money breeds money
Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher
Matching variant: Old enough to bleed, old enough to breed
Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease
Matching variant: Idleness breeds trouble
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
Courage breeds courage
Every solution creates new problems
Matching variant: Every solution breeds new problems