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 world, including its inflections. Clear word filter
24 entries
Common
10–99 recorded occurrences
Less common
1–9 recorded occurrences
Love makes the world go round
You can't save the world
The world is a place
Money makes the world go round
Laugh and the world laughs with you
Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door
The world owes you a living
The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world
A lie can travel around the world
Everybody loves a clown
Matching variant: All the world loves a clown
Everyone loves a lover
Matching variant: All the world loves a lover
It takes all sorts to make a world
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin
Not observed in this corpus
No full-form matches recorded; this does not mean the proverb is never used
A pint is a pound the world around
An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind
Don't try to save the world
Money runs the world
One half of the world does not know how the other half lives
The world is what you make it
You get out of life what you put into it
Matching variant: You get out of the world what you put into it