An open research project · Constanța, Romania

Humanity has been writing itself notes for three thousand years.

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.

Why your thirty seconds matter

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.

The oldest voice on the map is a Scottish collection printed in 1663 — most of its sayings still instantly recognizable four centuries later.

…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.

The same thought, worlds apart

Pairs like these were recorded continents apart — and verified by human judges as carrying the same idea:

Every verified link is drawn on the map — and each one started as somebody's thirty-second judgment.

Built in the open