Where can I find a list of English phrases?

Question

I'm tasked with searching for the use of cliches and common phrases in text. The phrases are similar to the phrases you might see for the phrase puzzles on Wheel of Fortune. Here are a few examples:

Easy Come Easy Go
Too Good To be True
Winning Isn't Everything

I cannot find a list of phrases however. Does anybody know of such a list?

Seriously, even a list of all Wheel of Fortune solutions would suffice.

Thanks for the answers so far, but I need something more comprehensive. As a test, it should probably have all three of my examples. Thanks. — Marcus Adams, Apr 19 '10 at 01:23

score 12 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 18 '16 at 07:43

12

Here's an enormous list for you (A-K), L-Z on the next page:

http://www.learn-english-today.com/proverbs/proverbs.html

Also, Wikiquote has a bunch for you:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/English_proverbs

If you want a list of clichés, look no further: http://clichesite.com/alpha_list.asp?which=lett+1

Both of these sites have the three you mentioned:

1) http://1001truisms.webs.com/truisms.htm

edited Feb 18 '16 at 07:43

Vivek Aditya

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answered Apr 19 '10 at 00:54

atp

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3 of the 5 links are dead now. – Joris Groosman Dec 23 '15 at 17:34
@JorisGroosman Yes , but i corrected 2 of the three dead links and removed the third – Vivek Aditya Feb 18 '16 at 06:46

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 19 '10 at 05:42

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If you want to generate a list automatically:

Scrape twitter and as may blogs as you can get RSS feeds for. Use them to build a corpus for a Markov chain and look for very high probability parses. I suspect Clichés will be very normal at the start but have unusually low entropy near the end. That is, once you see "X Y Z" you can say with near certainty that the next words will be "A B C".

answered Apr 19 '10 at 05:42

BCS

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upvoted for teaching how to fish – thepandaatemyface Apr 19 '10 at 17:26
@thepandaatemyface almost missed the fact that it was a common phrase (was thinking along the lines of phishing, which also applies, pun intended?) – Grant Peters Jun 02 '10 at 13:56

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 19 '10 at 01:19

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Cliché Site has a list of 2,100 idioms. The list looks pretty easy to harvest.

answered Apr 19 '10 at 01:19

dmcer

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score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 11 '18 at 17:44

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I know an answer has been accepted... but the answer is dated. Currently, wiktionary is the best place to go (~8000 entries): https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_idioms

answered Oct 11 '18 at 17:44

RussellB.

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score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 19 '10 at 00:54

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You should be able to harvest a list from http://evilpettingzoo.com/wheel/ pretty easily.

answered Apr 19 '10 at 00:54

Sebastian Paaske Tørholm

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Where can I find a list of English phrases?

5 Answers5

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