Engine, Engine, Number Nine Lyrics

This is a counting-out rhyme, a chant used to choose a player without arguing. The children stand in a ring, one of them says the rhyme and points to a different child on each beat. Whoever is pointed at on the very last word is out, and the chant starts again with the rest. When only one child is left, that child is it, the chaser or the hider, for the game that follows.

The words are mostly there for the beat. The engine has a number, nine, and runs on the Chicago line, a railroad route; it goes east, then west, then off to the cuckoo's nest, which is a playful place that does not exist on any map. The last line spells the word out letter by letter, so the spelling is also the counting.

The 1918 Journal of American Folk-Lore prints this in an article of Ontario folk-lore by F. W. Waugh, as one of a long run of counting-out rhymes, number 604 in his list, collected in Toronto. The article notes that the rhyme was also collected by W. J. Wintemberg in Oxford County, Ontario, and a footnote gives another way of ending the fourth line: o'er the cuckoo's nest.

The article also quotes two other versions from the Toronto newspaper The Globe, which printed children's counting-out rhymes in November and December 1909. In the one from Perth, Ontario, the engine runs to the lake at half-past eight and is back once more at half-past four. In the one from Thamesville, the last line asks Please tell me the time. When the person asked says a time, that number is counted off round the ring to decide who is out. So the rhyme was already being adapted from place to place more than a century ago.