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 change, including its inflections. Clear word filter
13 entries
Most common
100 or more recorded occurrences
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
a leopard can't change its spots
A person's basic character cannot fundamentally change.
Don't change horses in midstream
If you're not the lead dog, the view never changes
Some things you can't change
You can't change the rules in the middle of the game
A change is as good as a rest
Change is the only constant in life
Sorry doesn't help
Matching variant: Sorry doesn't change anything
To grow is to change
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used