Words worth understanding
Start with the thought in plain English. Then explore the imagery, a practical example, when to use it, and what the saying does not mean.
4,000 entries with editorial explanations. The wider collection also contains entries still awaiting an individual interpretation.
proverb · Traditional
The saying imagines exceptional reliability through a horse that never stumbles and a wife who never complains. Its standard of perfect performance and silence needs questioning.
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A cheerful wife called the spice of life praises pleasant companionship through a household image. The saying assigns a valued mood to a gendered role.
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A child not laughing at a mother’s supposed ugliness places affection beside a judgment of appearance. The saying asks for loyalty and respect despite an external beauty label.
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Affection can become excessive indulgence when it prevents a child from learning limits or acting independently. The saying questions how care is expressed, rather than suggesting that a child needs less love.
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A mother handing a child hot yam without scalding imagines parental care shielding the recipient. The saying gives a trusted relationship an apparently protective role.
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The saying imagines a dark man especially attractive to a fair woman. Its jewel metaphor praises a contrast in appearance from the imagined observer’s perspective.
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A deaf husband and blind wife called happy associates marital harmony with not hearing or seeing. The saying uses disabilities and gender roles to imply selective inattention.
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A good friend compared with a rare clover gives a valued relationship an image of welcome discovery. The saying appreciates companionship.
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A caring partnership and wellbeing can matter more than material possessions. The saying’s language of a wife as wealth needs a reading that preserves her independent dignity.
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The saying credits a good wife with making her husband good. It points to a partner’s influence, but can wrongly make a woman responsible for another adult’s character and choices.
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Wealth expected through marriage can bring demands and disagreements as well as apparent advantages. The bed represents the shared relationship, asking whether attention to resources has displaced consideration of the people and their expectations.
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A happy marriage as a long conversation that feels short pictures sustained companionship as absorbing and welcome. The image values shared engagement.
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The line reverses the arrangement of good and hard in a familiar partner-seeking saying. The result is comic wordplay with a sexual double meaning.
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Life with love praised and life for love condemned distinguish affection as part of life from making it the whole purpose. The saying values a broader balance.
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Life without love compared with a year without summer gives care and affection an image of missing warmth. The saying expresses the value of connection.
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A lion not eating its own cubs gives kinship an image of restraint toward the vulnerable. The saying imagines power limited by a protective relationship.
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The saying compares a life without love to death while still living. It uses a stark image to emphasise the felt absence of affection.
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A loving heart maintaining a family and a hateful heart destroying it contrast care with antagonism in shared life. The saying values the quality of relationships.
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Several major commitments can compete for time and resources. The saying exaggerates that tension by claiming marriage and prosperity cannot occur within one year.
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Marriage changing a man from incomplete to finished turns an expected fulfilment into a joke about defeat. The saying plays on two senses of completion.
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A man loving a sweetheart most, a wife best and a mother longest gives different relationships contrasting kinds of affection. The saying arranges love through fixed roles.
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The saying makes a man’s wife the source of his greatest good or bad fortune. It recognises the importance of a partnership while placing excessive responsibility for his whole life on her.
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The saying places a married couple outside a simple friend-or-enemy contrast. It suggests that a partnership may involve a relationship not captured by either label alone.
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The saying presents a mother’s care as enduring even as time passes. It is an affectionate image of lasting concern, not a guarantee that every mother-child relationship is loving or unchanged.
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