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 war, including its inflections. Clear word filter
15 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Generals always fight the last war
There is no substitute for victory
Matching variant: In war there is no substitute for victory
What if they gave a war and nobody came?
Truth is the first casualty of war
In war there is no prize for runner-up
No one wins a war
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used