Where can I find a list of English phrases?

Question

I'm tasked with searching for the use of cliches and common phrases in text. The phrases are similar to the phrases you might see for the phrase puzzles on Wheel of Fortune. Here are a few examples:

• Easy Come Easy Go
• Too Good To be True
• Winning Isn't Everything

I cannot find a list of phrases however. Does anybody know of such a list?

Seriously, even a list of all Wheel of Fortune solutions would suffice.

Answer 1

Here's an enormous list for you (A-K), L-Z on the next page:

http://www.learn-english-today.com/Proverbs/proverbs_A-K.html

Also, Wikiquote has a bunch for you:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/English_proverbs

If you want a list of clichés, look no further: http://clichesite.com/alpha_list.asp?which=lett+1

Both of these sites have the three you mentioned:

1) http://www.freewebs.com/1001truisms/1001truisms.htm

2) http://www.ninjawy.com/t94305.html (warning: so 90s-chain-email-style, it will make you vomit).

Answer 2

You should be able to harvest a list from http://evilpettingzoo.com/wheel/ pretty easily.

Answer 3

Cliché Site has a list of 2,100 idioms. The list looks pretty easy to harvest.

Answer 4

If you want to generate a list automatically:

Scrape twitter and as may blogs as you can get RSS feeds for. Use them to build a corpus for a Markov chain and look for very high probability parses. I suspect Clichés will be very normal at the start but have unusually low entropy near the end. That is, once you see "X Y Z" you can say with near certainty that the next words will be "A B C".