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 win, including its inflections. Clear word filter
23 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
In it to win it
A win is a win
Winning isn't everything
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
Matching variant: Nothing venture, nothing win
Heads I win, tails you lose
Slow and steady wins the race
Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing
You win some, you lose some
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose
You can't win them all
The one who dies with the most toys wins
It isn't whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game
You can't win if you don't play
A quitter never wins, and a winner never quits
If you don't run, you can't win
No one wins a war
Sometimes the dragon wins
Winning ugly is still winning
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used