Phraseology and Culture in English

4. Problems of inclusion 
The compiler of a dictionary of proverbs must first recognize an expression 
as proverbial in order for it to gain entry, and that recognition can depend 
heavily on what previous compilers of proverbs have recorded. Not only 
will early proverbs that have seldom or never been collected as such likely 
be excluded from historical dictionaries of proverbs, but new proverbs are 
unlikely to be admitted. In preparing “regular” dictionaries – dictionaries of 
words – editors or publishers routinely engage whole squadrons of paid and 
unpaid logophiles who are ever vigilant for new coinages and new uses, 
taking as their data base the whole panoply of current language acts: news-
papers, magazines, books, technical journals, television, radio, popular music, 
motion pictures, e-mail, s-mail, junk-mail, and oral discourse. Everyone 
knows that the lexicon of a language continually grows. But the case is 
different with dictionaries of proverbs. 
Even B.J. Whiting’s invaluable collection Modern Proverbs and Pro-
verbial Phrases, published in 1989, was not particularly “modern” in its 
purview. It was based on notes taken by Whiting as he detected proverbs in 
the course of his lifelong “light” reading (especially mystery novels); most 
of the works cited date from the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, 
with some citations from as late as the 1970s and early 1980s. 
All the twentieth-century compilations just referred to are “text-based”; 
that is, in the fashion of the OED, for each entry they illustrate the proverb 
with brief quotations (sometimes just citations), in chronological sequence, 
taken from printed sources. Often the historical citations in an entry will refer 

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Collections of proverbs and proverb dictionaries
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to early printed collections of proverbs, dubiously attesting to the currency 
of a given proverb at the times the previous collections were published. 
A different approach served as the basis for Wolfgang Mieder, Stuart 
Kingsbury, and Kelsey Harder’s Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992). 
The entries derive from an extensive collecting project sponsored by the 
American Dialect Society and supervised by the late Margaret M. Bryant, 
in which academicians and laypeople were encouraged to write down and 
mail in expressions that they had heard and that sounded proverbial to them; 
mostly, the items were submitted between the mid-1940s and the mid-1970s.