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 find, including its inflections. Clear word filter
16 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Water seeks its own level
Matching variant: Water finds its own level
Love will find a way
A good woman is hard to find
Love is where you find it
The devil finds work for idle hands
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut
Happiness is where you find it
When you are in a hole, stop digging
Matching variant: If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used