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 once, including its inflections. Clear word filter
21 entries
Most common
100 or more recorded occurrences
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me
once bitten, twice shy
a bad experience makes you cautious about repeating it
Christmas comes but once a year
Once you go black, you never go back
Once a thief, always a thief
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut
Matching variant: Even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while
You only go around once in life
You're only old once
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
Buy the best and you only cry once
If you can't ride two horses at once, you shouldn't be in the circus
Once seen, never forgotten
One cannot be in two places at once
Opportunity never knocks twice
Matching variant: Opportunity knocks but once