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 down, including its inflections. Clear word filter
23 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Life has its ups and downs
You can't keep a good man down
Don't let the bastards grind you down
The nail that sticks up must be hammered down
If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down
You get knocked down, you get up
A smile is just a frown turned upside down
Don't go down without a fight
Never hit a man when he's down
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used