More than twenty years ago, I had fun tracing a similar phenomenon: English “proverbs” that appeared in English dictionaries and textbooks published in Japan but that did not seem to have any actual currency in English. It became clear that they had been copied from dictionary to dictionary for decades before large-scale corpora and search engines made it possible to check actual usage.

“Every man has his humo(u)r.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0001.html

“Losers are always in the wrong.”

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0098.html

In their heyday, dozens of English-Japanese dictionaries were published in Japan:

https://www.gally.net/leavings/00/0005.html

Producing an original dictionary from scratch would have been expensive and time consuming, so most publishers borrowed liberally from each other.