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 sometimes, including its inflections. Clear word filter
7 entries
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day
Matching variant: Even a broken clock is right sometimes
Sometimes you're the windshield, and sometimes you're the bug
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut
Matching variant: A blind squirrel sometimes finds an acorn