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 bring, including its inflections. Clear word filter
7 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Bring 'em back alive
April showers bring May flowers
Dance with the one who brung you
Matching variant: Dance with the one who brought you
Wisdom comes with age
Matching variant: Age brings wisdom
Never take a knife to a gunfight
Matching variant: Never bring a knife to a gunfight
Tragedy is an opportunity
Matching variant: Tragedy brings opportunity