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 horse, including its inflections. Clear word filter
21 entries
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth
A nod is as good as a wink
Matching variant: A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Don't change horses in midstream
Don't put the cart before the horse
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
A live dog is better than a dead lion
Matching variant: A live horse is better than a dead lion