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 lose, including its inflections. Clear word filter
18 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose
Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose
It isn't whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game
Abuse it and lose it
When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle
It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye
Move your feet, lose your seat
Mud thrown is ground lost
Matching variant: When you throw dirt, you lose ground
What you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts
You booze, you lose
You can't fail unless you quit
Matching variant: You never lose until you quit