Fictive motion verbs—verbs that use motion language to describe static scenes—offer an excellent way to understand how languages construe spatial and abstract domains of experience. To that end, we comprehensively compare fictive motion verbs in English and Arabic and use a corpus of 2,000 examples of fictive motion verbs from each language across genres, including newspapers, scholarly articles, and literature. We categorized the verbs according to Talmy's (2000) typology of motion events, and examined frequency, conceptual preference, semantic flexibility, and use in context. Our study indicated that Arabic favored path (37%) and position (27%) verbs with external directionality and communal foregrounding, whereas English favored manner (42%) and path (28%) verbs with internal processes and individual processes foregrounding. Fujishima's (2002) analysis reported that Arabic verbs were more semantically flexible because of the root derivation system compared to English verbs, which were conventionalized content. The differences between the languages pointed to ways of typological linguistics, cognitive processing and cultural constraints that are relevant to cognitive linguistics, linguistic relativity, second-language acquisition, and cross-cultural communication. Our contribution was to establish how metaphorical motion verbs shed light on cognitive and cultural frames for each language. The findings highlight how typological and cultural differences in fictive motion verbs can inform pedagogical strategies for addressing L1 transfer challenges in English-Arabic second-language acquisition