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 easy, including its inflections. Clear word filter
17 entries
Most common
100 or more recorded occurrences
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Many hands make light work
Matching variant: Many hands make easy work
It ain't easy being easy
It's easier to get forgiveness than permission
Nothing is as simple as it seems
Matching variant: Nothing is as easy as it looks
Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry all easy
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven
It's easy to be wise after the event
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used