  Proverbs are an essential component of language and culture, and though much
attention has been paid to their history and currency, there has been
comparatively little quantitative work on changes in the frequency with which
they are used over time. With wider availability of large corpora reflecting
many diverse genres of documents, it is now possible to take a broad and
dynamic view of the importance of the proverb. Here, we measure temporal
changes in the relevance of proverbs within three corpora, differing in kind,
scale, and time frame: Millions of books over centuries; hundreds of millions
of news articles over twenty years; and billions of tweets over a decade. We
find that proverbs present heavy-tailed frequency-of-usage rank distributions
in each venue; exhibit trends reflecting the cultural dynamics of the eras
covered; and have evolved into contemporary forms on social media.
