About this Website

Purpose

This site is an electronic version of Morris Palmer Tilley’s A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. The original book is out of print, but here it’s paired with search, analysis, and links between related proverbs.

Source Material

The core content comes from the following work, made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license:

A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
by Morris Palmer Tilley (1950, University of Michigan Press)

Background

The project is entirely independent. It has no association with the University of Michigan or the original publication and is run by one person. It was partly inspired by Johnson’s Dictionary Online.

Extra Features

The “Meaning & Analysis” sections for each proverb are generated by LLMs. The following models were used to create the analysis for each letter group:

gemini-2.5-pro:

C, D, E, G, I, J, K, M, O, Q, R, S, U, V, W, Y

gpt-4o:

A, L, N

gpt-4.1:

F, P, Z

gpt-5.0-thinking:

B, H, T

The “Related Proverbs” lists are created using word-embeddings, which look for proverbs that share related language or ideas. The following model was used:dengcao/Qwen3-Embedding-8B:Q8_0.

These features are entirely new and were not part of Tilley’s original work.

Ongoing Work

The site contains 11,820 proverbs across 12,758 pages. The text was extracted from digital scans, so occasional transcription errors remain. These are corrected over time.

Helping Out

If you enjoy the site, share a proverb on social media. Each one has a unique image taken from Tilley’s original and designed to look good in posts. You can also reach out using the contact form.

Privacy

There are no cookies, ads, or tracking scripts here. Basic visit counts come from Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is privacy-respecting and does not track individuals.