An open research project · Constanța, Romania
Proverbs are how communities remember what works: whom to trust, when to wait, when many hands help — and when too many cooks spoil it. We gathered tens of thousands of them, from a Scottish collection printed in 1663 to sayings still traded today, and mapped where the same wisdom appears across languages, continents, and centuries.
The map: pick any motif and watch its trail across cultures — drag the time slider to replay its documented record through the centuries. The game: thirty seconds on your phone, and the map literally redraws because of you.
"Where there is smoke, there is fire."
Found in 17 cultures, from Spain to Vietnam, across at least five language families.
Machines can gather proverbs, but only people can judge whether two sayings from different worlds carry the same idea. Every judgment you make is weighed, cross-checked against other players, and folded into the map — and published (anonymously) as open scientific data that researchers anywhere can build on.
Two sayings, side by side, in plain English. Same rule? Same advice? Just the same theme? You decide.
Judgments steer how proverbs cluster across cultures — and audit the algorithms that do it.
Everything becomes citable open data with a DOI. Your nickname stays on the leaderboard; the data stays anonymous.
…and growing weekly: the corpus crawls open collections, and every new judgment sharpens the picture. Visit the map twice; it will not be the same map.