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 small, including its inflections. Clear word filter
14 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Good things come in small packages
Don't sweat the small stuff - and it's all small stuff
From little acorns grow mighty oaks
Matching variant: Mighty oaks from small acorns grow
Small is the new big
There are no small roles, only small actors
Aim small, miss small
Progress comes in small steps
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used