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 run, including its inflections. Clear word filter
15 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Still waters run deep
The course of true love never did run smooth
If you can't run with the big dogs, stay on the porch
Shit rolls downhill
Matching variant: Shit runs downhill
He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day
If nominated, I will not run, and if elected, I will not serve
If you don't run, you can't win
You need to learn to walk before you can run
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used