About

An open dictionary of the world's proverbs.

Every culture has said, in its own way, the same wise things. Paremia is the map of where those sayings meet — and where they diverge.

The problem

Proverbs are the oldest form of common wisdom, and the most beautifully translated. The Greek says the donkey called the rooster big-headed; the Arab says the camel doesn't see its own hump; the English says the pot called the kettle black. All three cultures are pointing at the same idea — projected hypocrisy — but you would have to be a linguist and a folklorist to find that out today. Existing databases are authoritative and dated; most modern sites are per-language collections that stop at their own edge.

The idea

One search bar. Type a word, a theme, or a proverb in any language. Paremia finds matching proverbs across cultures and shows them together — original text, literal translation, and the closest equivalent in your language, all keyed to a shared concept. The second phase is an atlas: browse by theme, image, era, or region, and see the shared wisdom of humanity as data.

How it's built

Every proverb belongs to a concept cluster — a group of sayings across cultures that point at the same idea. Clusters are seeded from published paremiological work (Matti Kuusi, ProverbNet, MAPS) and hand-curated. Each entry carries its original text, transliteration, literal English translation, meaning gloss, cultural notes, source citation, and edit history. The whole corpus is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, and every read endpoint of the API is free.

Who it's for

• Anyone who has ever tried to translate a proverb and had it come out sideways.
• Translators, poets, screenwriters, ad copywriters, ESL teachers.
• Linguists, folklorists, and comparative-literature scholars — who deserve a modern interface for a very old subject.
• The people whose grandmothers had a saying for everything.

Principles

1. Wiki, not walled garden. Free to read, free to reuse, open to contribution.
2. Provenance first. Every entry cites its source. Folk-traditional proverbs are labelled as such.
3. Culture, not passport. We tag proverbs by cultural tradition, not modern nation-state, whenever the record supports it.
4. Literal and equivalent. We show both — the literal because it's beautiful, the equivalent because it's useful.
5. Small edits, big archive. A proverb corpus grows one entry at a time. We're patient.

Status

This is an early public MVP. The seed corpus is a few dozen concept clusters across five launch languages (English, Greek, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin). Contribution flow, full search backend, community features, and the atlas view are on the roadmap.

If you want to contribute a proverb, a language, or your expertise, start here.

Every language has a proverb for this.