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 end, including its inflections. Clear word filter
15 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Every story ends
Everything must come to an end
There's always light at the end of the tunnel
Every journey has an end
Of making many books there is no end
The end crowns all
There is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
Even the longest day has its end
If you don't know where you are going, you might not get there
Matching variant: If you don't know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else