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 woman, including its inflections. Clear word filter
27 entries
Most common
100 or more recorded occurrences
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
A woman is a woman
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle
A woman's work is never done
A woman's place is in the House and Senate
Well-behaved women rarely make history
A good woman is hard to find
Behind every great man there's a great woman
Frailty, thy name is woman
Women should be barefoot and pregnant
Never underestimate the power of a woman
The woman pays
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
A man without a woman is like a fish without a bicycle
A man without a woman is like a ship without a sail
A man's got to do what a man's got to do; a woman must do what he can't
A woman is as old as she looks
A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke
If you want something done, ask a busy person
Matching variant: If you want something done, ask a busy woman