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 eat, including its inflections. Clear word filter
20 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
You are what you eat
Let them eat cake
You've got to eat
Eat, drink, and be merry
the proof of the pudding is in the eating
You can only judge something's value by trying or experiencing it.
It's a dog-eat-dog world
You can't have your cake and eat it too
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Big fish eat little fish
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat thy bread
Don't shit where you eat
Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without
Matching variant: Eat it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime
If you don't know what it is, don't mess with it
Matching variant: If you don't know what it is, don't eat it
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used