Antiproverb

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A humorous adaptation of one or more existing proverbs.

    "The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed.¶ Another species of anti-proverb, this one plays on the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” which seems to have emerged in the 1960s."

  2. 2
    A proverb that contradicts another.

    "But for every proverb there is an antiproverb ("Too many cooks spoil the broth" vs. "Two heads are better than one," and so on)."

Example

More examples

"The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed.¶ Another species of anti-proverb, this one plays on the phrase “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” which seems to have emerged in the 1960s."

Etymology

Coined by paremiologist Wolfgang Mieder in 1982, anti- + proverb.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.