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

I'm Reynald, and Idiomingo is my project. I build it on my own, in my spare time. There is no company behind it, 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.

I review every batch of entries before it goes on the site. For origins, that means checking each one against dictionaries and reference works in the idiom's own language, and deleting entries that turn out not to be real idioms.

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

What's in it

  • 2,273 proverbs, with French, Spanish, German, Italian and Japanese equivalents where I have them.
  • 3,388 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 in October 2026 close to nine hundred idiom origins that only described the picture, rather than where the phrase came from, were rewritten and checked against sources.

How I handle origins

Origins get the closest scrutiny of anything on Idiomingo. Many popular etymologies turn out to be later inventions, so each origin is checked against sources before it goes on the site. Documented origins are stated as fact. Where the accepted story is traditional, the entry says so. Where the true origin is unknown, the entry says that too, rather than repeating a myth.

Corrections and contact

with corrections, sources, or a saying from your language that should be here.