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 look, including its inflections. Clear word filter
25 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
The grass is always greener on the other side
Matching variant: The grass looks greener on the other side of the fence
Don't look a gift horse in the mouth
Always look for the silver lining
It costs nothing to look
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Matching variant: When you hear hoofbeats, don't look for zebras
A cat can look at a king
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck
It's all in the way you look at it
Nothing is as simple as it seems
Matching variant: Nothing is as easy as it looks
Stop, look, listen
The more you look, the more you see
All coons look alike
Don't look back; something might be gaining on you
It is better to look good than to feel good
The devil looks after his own
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used