ADAGE

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does adage mean? 

• ADAGE (noun)
  The noun ADAGE has 1 sense:

1. a condensed but memorable saying embodying some important fact of experience that is taken as true by many people

  Familiarity information: ADAGE used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• ADAGE (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A condensed but memorable saying embodying some important fact of experience that is taken as true by many people

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

adage; byword; proverb; saw

Hypernyms ("adage" is a kind of...):

expression; locution; saying (a word or phrase that particular people use in particular situations)

 Context examples 

A curious friendship theirs must have been: a pointed illustration, indeed, of the old adage that "extremes meet."

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)

Researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), Vanderbilt University and colleagues around the world took advantage of a simulated mission to Mars to put the old adage to the test.

(Salty Diet Makes You Hungry, Not Thirsty, The Titi Tudorancea Bulletin)

Miss Trotwood, or Miss Betsey, as my poor mother always called her, when she sufficiently overcame her dread of this formidable personage to mention her at all (which was seldom), had been married to a husband younger than herself, who was very handsome, except in the sense of the homely adage, handsome is, that handsome does—for he was strongly suspected of having beaten Miss Betsey, and even of having once, on a disputed question of supplies, made some hasty but determined arrangements to throw her out of a two pair of stairs' window.

(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)

At that moment a little accident supervened, which seemed decreed by fate purposely to prove the truth of the adage, that misfortunes never come singly, and to add to their distresses the vexing one of the slip between the cup and the lip.

(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)