Sources & Methodology
Where every part of this collection comes from, which fields are quoted from reference works and which are written, how entries are checked, and what I have corrected along the way.
Proverbs
| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Proverb text | A Dictionary of English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases (London: Whittaker & Co., undated, c. 1880; credited to Thomas Preston), Project Gutenberg ebook #39281. Public domain. |
| Meanings of the dictionary sayings | Written by a language model. The dictionary prints its sayings without explanations, so a one-sentence meaning was written for each. |
| Origin notes | Researched and checked against published sources, one by one, for every proverb with a traceable history. The sayings that exist only in the dictionary carry a short note naming it as their source. |
| Origin flag and date | Set by hand from each reviewed origin note, not guessed from the text. |
| Additional entries and translations | English Wiktionary, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. |
| French, Spanish and Italian equivalents | Henry G. Bohn, A Polyglot of Foreign Proverbs (1857), Project Gutenberg ebook #51090. Public domain. |
In September 2026 every proverb origin note with a traceable history was rewritten and checked against sources before it was saved. Those checks regularly overturned popular attributions. Sayings credited to Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Winston Churchill, Confucius or "an African proverb" were often not theirs. In those cases the note now names the earliest documented source, or says plainly that the origin has not been traced.
Where a proverb carries a translation, it is not always a proverb that people actually use in the other language. Some are genuine equivalents, others are renderings of the English. The data does not yet mark which is which.
Idioms
| Field | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| The phrase itself | English Wiktionary, used to confirm that each idiom is real and in use, plus batches curated by hand from published idiom collections. |
| Literal translation and meaning | Written by a language model, then verified. Wiktionary's own definitions are used only to check accuracy and are never copied, so no CC BY-SA text enters the database. |
| Origin | Researched against etymonline, World Wide Words, phrases.org.uk, Grammarist and dictionaries in each idiom's own language. Where the popular story is folklore, as with get someone's goat or talk turkey, the entry says so. |
| Example sentence | Written for Idiomingo by a language model and reviewed. Every example is original: none is copied or adapted from a dictionary or phrase site. |
| English equivalent | Only a real English idiom with the same meaning, never a plain paraphrase. Each one links to its own English entry. Where English has no true equivalent, none is shown. |
Since September 20, 2026, every idiom in every language has an example sentence showing it in use, and most non-English idioms show their closest English counterpart.
Other collections
Untranslatable words, false friends, compliments and insults, and tongue twisters follow the idiom process: the words and phrases are real, and their explanations are written and then checked.
How entries are checked
- Attestation. Every idiom is checked against English Wiktionary for whether the phrase exists and is filed under the right language.
- Fabrication and etymology audit. A separate review looks specifically for invented phrases, wrong language labels and origins that read as made up.
- Source checks on origins. Every less certain date, quotation or attribution in an origin note is checked online before it is saved. Claims that cannot be confirmed are removed.
- Hand review. Anything flagged is rewritten or deleted by a person. Duplicates are merged into a single entry, and the old address redirects to it.
- What counts as an idiom. An idiom must be a phrase of more than one word. Single words used figuratively, such as bug, and plain compounds, such as breadwinner, are removed. When an idiom has several wordings, the card uses the one people most commonly say.
Corrections I have made
- June 2026: seventeen idioms that two independent audits judged fabricated were deleted.
- June 2026: one entry (臥虎藏龍) was relabeled from Japanese to Chinese.
- June 2026: nine origins judged likely false, including cloud nine and cold shoulder, were rewritten.
- August–September 2026: around two hundred thin or unsupported idiom origins were rewritten across sixteen languages, and duplicate entries were merged.
- September 2026: more than 600 proverb origin notes were rewritten and source-checked, and duplicate proverbs were merged. The Preston dictionary's date was corrected from the long-repeated "1870" to c. 1880: its preface mentions "the late Earl Russell", who died in 1878.
- September 2026: 237 English idiom origins that described usage rather than history were rewritten, and garbled titles from a book import were repaired.
- September 2026: non-idioms (single words and plain compounds) were removed from every language, and near-duplicate idioms were merged into their most common form.
- October 2026: close to nine hundred idiom origins in more than fifty languages that only described the picture, rather than where the phrase came from, were rewritten and checked against dictionaries in each idiom's own language. Plain phrases found along the way were deleted, and a few foreign proverbs were moved from Idioms to Proverbs.
Known limitations
- Meanings, literal translations and example sentences for idioms are written, not quoted. They are verified, but they do not come from a printed reference work, as the proverbs do.
- Some proverb translations are renderings rather than sayings in use in the target language, and are not yet labeled as such.
- Some origins cannot be known. A source can confirm that a phrase exists and when it was first recorded, but often not where it began. Where that is the case, the entry says so.
If you find something wrong, emailing me is the fastest way to get it fixed.