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 think, including its inflections. Clear word filter
19 entries
Most common
100 or more recorded occurrences
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Think before you speak
It's later than you think
When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras
Act first and think later
Close your eyes and think of England
It's what you learn after you know it all that counts
Matching variant: It is what we learn after we think we know it all that counts
Study long, study wrong
Matching variant: Think long, think wrong
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
Everything takes longer than it should
Matching variant: Things always take longer than you think