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 let, including its inflections. Clear word filter
32 entries
Most common
100 or more recorded occurrences
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
let bygones be bygones
To forgive and forget past disagreements.
Let nature take its course
Let them eat cake
let sleeping dogs lie
To avoid raising an old issue that could cause trouble.
Let the buyer beware
Let's face facts
make hay while the sun shines
to take advantage of favourable conditions while they last
Matching variant: Let's make hay while the sun shines
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Never let them see you sweat
Friends don't let friends drive drunk
Let the dead bury their dead
Let George do it
Don't let the bastards grind you down
Never let a crisis go to waste
Drive thy business, let not that drive thee
If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down
Kill 'em all. Let God sort 'em out
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
Let go; let God
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
A cobbler should stick to his last
Matching variant: Let the shoemaker stick to his last