once bitten, twice shy
Proposed by a contributor, not yet supported by evidence.
Having been hurt once, someone is more cautious next time.
Đã bị tổn thương một lần, người ta sẽ cẩn thận hơn lần sau
Machine-translated — suggest a fix
Examples
British National Corpus sentence via the MAGPIE corpus (CC BY 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-30)
Sources & notes
Listed on Wikipedia “List of proverbial phrases” (CC BY-SA 4.0, retrieved 2026-07-29); definition pending editorial review. Definition drafted by AI (@cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast) and auto-approved by rule on 2026-07-30; pending editor spot-check.
Equivalents & related
Common questions
What does “once bitten, twice shy” mean?
Having been hurt once, someone is more cautious next time. Literally: an animal biting once and the person being more careful afterwards
Is “once bitten, twice shy” formal or informal?
No register label has been reviewed yet — treat it as neutral and check the usage notes above.
What is the closest equivalent?
“chim sợ cành cong” (Tiếng Việt) — near equivalent.