About Idiomingo

Idiomingo is a collection of proverbs, idioms and sayings from more than fifty cultures — each with its literal translation, what it actually means, and where it comes from.

Who makes it

One person, working on it in their own time. There is no company behind Idiomingo, no editorial team, and no funding. That is worth saying plainly, because it sets the right expectations about how quickly mistakes get found and fixed.

If you spot something wrong — a bad translation, an invented origin, a phrase attributed to the wrong language — please write to idiomingo.support@gmail.com. Corrections are the most useful mail this project gets.

What's in it

• 1,866 proverbs, with French, Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese equivalents where we have them.
• 2,784 idioms across roughly fifty languages — the largest collection here, and the one the site is really built around.
• 111 untranslatable words, 105 false friends, 84 compliments and insults, and 97 tongue twisters.

How an entry gets here

Three stages, and they are not equally strong — which is the honest thing to say about a project like this:

1. Gathering. Proverbs come from public-domain dictionaries; idiom phrases are identified from Wiktionary; some batches are curated by hand.
2. Writing. Meanings, literal translations and origins are drafted — for the idiom collection, by a language model working from the sourced phrase, then checked by a second, stricter pass that rejects anything it cannot attest.
3. Auditing. Automated checks look for phrases that do not exist, entries filed under the wrong language, and etymologies that look invented. What they flag gets rewritten or deleted by hand.

The full breakdown is on the sources page, including which fields are model-written and what is still weak. Two things worth knowing up front: seventeen fabricated idioms were found and deleted in June 2026, and around sixty-nine origin notes are still flagged as doubtful and have not yet been dealt with.

Why "origin" is the field to be careful with

The origin of a saying is usually unknowable. Plenty of confident-sounding etymologies in circulation are Victorian invention or internet folklore. Where a story is traditional rather than established, entries say so rather than presenting it as fact — and where an origin genuinely is not known, the honest answer is preferred over a good story.

Corrections and contact

idiomingo.support@gmail.com — corrections, sources, or a saying from your language that should be here.