“If needs had been horses” was a broadly standard pronouncing over the centuries, being featured in all kinds of nursery rhymes, which may as smartly be the true supply for the proverb.
It additionally emerged in numerous standard iterations, such because the rhyming “If needs had been fishes, we’d all swim in riches”, which first seemed in print within the overdue 19th century.
Since then, each the unique idiom and its diversifications have transform a well-liked common in English, used to disregard mindless having a pipe dream.
