What Is a Nursery Rhyme? Meaning, Kinds and Where the Name Comes From

A nursery rhyme is a short, traditional verse or song for young children. It rhymes, it has a strong beat, it repeats itself, and it was handed down by being said aloud long before anyone thought to print it. That is the whole definition, and every word of it matters, so this post takes the pieces one at a time.

Along the way it covers the main kinds of nursery rhyme, where the name comes from (it is younger than most people guess), the oldest dated rhymes in our own collection, what researchers have found about why they help small children, and how a nursery rhyme differs from a song or a poem. All the numbers about our own pages come from a script that counts our collection as it stands today, 934 rhymes in all.

The short answer

The Wikipedia article on the subject defines a nursery rhyme as "a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries", and treats it as a part of childlore, the games and verses children pass among themselves. Two words in that sentence do the work. Traditional means that nobody is credited: the rhyme belongs to everyone who has said it. For children means it is built for small mouths and short attention spans.

Most of what we call nursery rhymes in English came together in Britain, and the collecting started in the 1700s. But the habit of reciting rhymes to babies is far older and far wider than that, and our collection includes rhymes for babies and French rhymes with English translations.

What makes something a nursery rhyme

There is no committee that decides. In practice a verse earns the label by having most of these five traits.

• It is short. Among the 701 rhymes on our site that have no named author, the middle one is 5 lines long, and 543 of them, about 77 percent, run to 8 lines or fewer. The rhymes on our site that do have a named author (233 of them, mostly poems) have a median of 12 lines, more than twice as long.
• It rhymes, or at least chimes. Matching line endings make the next word easy to predict, which is half the fun for a child who already knows how it ends.
• It has a beat. Strong, regular stresses make it easy to clap, rock or bounce to. Many of the best-known rhymes are really rhythms with words attached.
• It repeats. Repeated lines, repeated sounds and repeated patterns (one, two, buckle my shoe; three, four, shut the door) let a child join in after one hearing.
• It travelled by mouth. The version a family knows is usually the version a parent or grandparent said to them, with small changes. That is why the same rhyme turns up in several slightly different forms.

None of these is strict. A rhyme can be sung or spoken, silly or quiet, and some famous ones break one rule or another. What they all have in common is that a three-year-old can learn them without being taught.

The main kinds

The word "nursery rhyme" covers several different jobs. A rhyme for rocking a baby to sleep has little in common with a rhyme for a game of tag, except the rhyming. These are the families most often named, with the number of pages we have for each. The groups overlap, since a rhyme can be both a clapping game and a counting rhyme, so the numbers do not add up to 934.

Lullabies deserve a special mention. According to the Wikipedia article, citing Iona and Peter Opie's Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1997, page 6), lullabies are the oldest recorded children's songs, though before modern times they were usually written down only by accident, as a line in a book about something else.

Riddle rhymes are the kind people forget. "Black within, and red without; four corners round about" is a two-line riddle, and the answer is a chimney. The historian J. A. Sharpe, writing in the Oxford Companion to British History, notes that some nursery rhymes "lie in riddles, others in singing games." Riddles are one of the oldest ways of asking a child to think, and they sit comfortably beside the counting rhymes and the lullabies.

Where the name comes from

The expression "nursery rhyme" is newer than the rhymes. Children were learning Pat-a-Cake and Hickory Dickory Dock long before anyone called them that, and the earlier names tell a story of their own.

1. 1744: "Tommy Thumb". Tommy Thumb's Song Book and its sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, were published in London in 1744 by Mary Cooper, according to Wikipedia. They are the earliest known printed collections of English rhymes for children, and for a while the songs were simply known as Tommy Thumb's songs. Seven of the pages in our collection give 1744 (or about 1744) as the date a rhyme first appeared in print, among them Hickory Dickory Dock, Baa Baa Black Sheep and London Bridge.
2. 1780: "Mother Goose". A London book called Mother Goose's Melody, or Sonnets for the Cradle was the first to attach the Mother Goose name to rhymes. Before that, Mother Goose had meant French fairy tales. The full story, including which dates are solid and which are disputed, is in our post Who Was Mother Goose?
3. 1824: "nursery rhyme". The earliest dated use of the phrase that we could confirm is July 1824, in an anonymous essay in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. We have this from the Victorian Web, a literature site run from Brown University, which adds that before then the rhymes were called "songs" or "ditties". Other reference works put the phrase a little earlier, "about 1800", and the Oxford English Dictionary entry would settle it; we could not open that entry, so treat 1824 as the earliest date we can document, not as a proven first.

So the phrase appeared roughly eighty years after the first printed collection, and about forty after Mother Goose. The "nursery" part is simply the children's room of a Georgian or Victorian house, where the rhymes were said by a nurse or a parent. The word is a clue to who the rhymes were for: not school-age children, but the very young, in the care of an adult.

The oldest dated rhymes on our site

Of our 934 rhyme pages, 53 carry a date for the earliest known appearance in writing. The other 881 pages give no first-print year, either because the origin cannot be dated or because the piece is a poem by a known author. The spread of those 53 looks like this: 6 before 1700, 22 in the 1700s, 24 in the 1800s and 1 later.

The oldest eight, by the date on each page, are these.

Read the right-hand column before you quote the left. A date is only the earliest trace we have found. A rhyme sung to babies for fifty years before someone wrote it down looks, in the records, exactly like a rhyme invented the week it was printed. The Wikipedia article makes the same point: most nursery rhymes were not written down until the 1700s, though many were clearly older, and it adds that about half of the rhymes now thought of as traditional English ones were known by the middle of that century.

Why they help young children

Parents and teachers say rhymes help children with language. There is real research behind that, though it is narrower than the slogans suggest. One much-cited study is by P. E. Bryant, L. Bradley, M. Maclean and J. Crossland, published in 1989 in the Journal of Child Language. They followed 64 children from the age of three years four months to six years three months. At the start they measured how many nursery rhymes each child knew. Over the next three years they tracked the children's sensitivity to rhyme and to individual sounds, and later their reading and spelling.

The result, in the authors' words, was "a strong relation between early knowledge of nursery rhymes and success in reading and spelling". That held after the researchers allowed for social background, IQ and the children's starting skills with sounds. Their explanation is that knowing rhymes builds an ear for the sounds inside words, and that ear helps when children begin to read. When the researchers also controlled for those later sound skills, the direct link to reading weakened, which fits the idea that sound awareness is the route by which rhymes help. You can read the abstract on the Cambridge University Press page for the study.

It is worth being plain about what this does and does not show. It is one study of 64 children, and it shows an association over time, not that reciting rhymes causes better reading by itself. We read the abstract, not the full paper.

Beyond that study, the practical reasons are things you can see for yourself, and we label them as observation, not research.

• Language. A rhyme gives a toddler whole phrases in a fixed order, with unusual words (fiddle, tuffet, dock) that never come up at the dinner table.
• Rhythm and movement. Bouncing, clapping and finger counting tie the words to the body. It is the reason action rhymes work so well with babies who cannot yet talk.
• Memory. A short rhyming text with a beat is easy to hold in the head. A child who can finish the last word of a line is already remembering.
• Closeness. Most rhymes are said face to face, in a lap or at a changing table, and that is part of the point.

How a nursery rhyme differs from a song or a poem

The edges are blurry, and plenty of items sit on more than one side. Still, three differences hold up.

From a song. Many nursery rhymes are not sung at all. On our pages, the "how it is said" label reads "spoken rhyme" for 184 of them, more than any other label. A song needs a tune to be itself; a rhyme only needs a voice. Others are sung, but the tune can change over the years while the words stay, as with Three Blind Mice in the table above, whose oldest printed tune of 1609 came with quite different words.

From a poem. A poem has an author, and the author's words are meant to stay put. Take Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: the words come from "The Star", a poem by Jane Taylor, published in 1806 in a book called Rhymes for the Nursery. It is now sung by almost every child in the English-speaking world, so it works as a nursery rhyme, but its path started with a named writer. A traditional rhyme has no such starting point; it is a thing that was said, changed and said again. On our site 701 of the 934 pages have no named author, and 233 do.

From a game. Some rhymes are really instructions: the words tell the players when to circle, when to clap and when to sit down. On their own the words can look odd, because they were made to go with the movements. Our ring games page is the place to see how many rhymes are games first and verses second.

Using them with children

Because nursery rhymes are short and rhythmic, they fit into the gaps of a day: at a nappy change, in the car, while waiting for the kettle. A few habits make them work better.

• Say them rather than playing a recording now and then. Your own voice, slower and closer, is better for a baby than any track.
• Leave out the last word of a line and wait. Children who know the rhyme love to supply it.
• Change the speed. A rhyme said slowly, then fast, then in a whisper teaches children to listen to the sounds, not only the meaning.
• Do not worry about the exact version. A family's own wording is part of the tradition.

For a classroom or a group, the action rhymes and ring games are the easiest place to begin. At home, a handful of lullabies in the evening is usually enough.