adage
Other forms: adages
An adage is a saying. Moms and dads love adages such as "early to bed, early to rise" and "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."
The noun adage comes from the Latin root aio, meaning "I say." Like a proverb, an adage can be true or not so much. It's a folksy saying that's been passed around for so long that it doesn't even matter if it's true anymore. Adages can be wise and wisecracking, such as this quote from Alice Roosevelt Longworth: "I've always believed in the adage that the secret of eternal youth is arrested development." There's a Book of Proverbs in the Bible, but adages can show up anywhere, even cross-stitched on a pillow.
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a condensed but memorable saying embodying some important fact of experience that is taken as true by many people
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Vocabulary lists containing adage
The top 1,000 vocabulary words have been carefully chosen to represent difficult but common words that appear in everyday academic and business writing. These words are also the most likely to appear on the SAT, ACT, GRE, and ToEFL. To create this list, we started with the words that give our users the most trouble and then ranked them by how frequently they appear in our corpus of billions of words from edited sources. If you only have time to study one list of words, this is the list.
In this tragedy, Macbeth's belief in a prophecy and his ambition to become king lead to murder and madness.
To improve your fluency in English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR), learn this academic vocabulary list that includes words selected from the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) state standards.