"Ding Dong Bell" or "Ding Dong Dell" is a popular

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nursery rhyme A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and other European countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes. Fr ...

. It has a

Roud Folk Song Index The Roud Folk Song Index is a database of around 250,000 references to nearly 25,000 songs collected from oral tradition in the English language from all over the world. It is compiled by Steve Roud. Roud's Index is a combination of the Broadsid ...

number of 12853.

Words

One modern version, cited by ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'', is: I. Opie and P. Opie, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), p. 174.

Origins

The earliest recorded reference to the rhyme is from John Lant, the organist of Winchester Cathedral in 1580, who recorded the following rhyme: It was printed in Thomas Ravenscroft's ''Pammelia, Musicks Miscellanie'' in 1609, as a canon for four voices. The phrase 'Ding, dong, bell' also appears in these passages of

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's plays: ''

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'', Act I, Scene II: ''

The Merchant of Venice ''The Merchant of Venice'' is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. A merchant in Venice named Antonio defaults on a large loan taken out on behalf of his dear friend, Bassanio, and provided by a ...

'', Act III, Scene II: The earliest version to resemble the modern one is from ''Mother Goose's Melody'' published in London around 1765. The additional lines that include (arguably) the more acceptable ending for children with the survival of the cat are in James Orchard Halliwell's ''Nursery Rhymes of England'', where the cat is pulled out by "Dog with long snout". Several names are used for the malevolent Johnny Green, including Tommy O' Linne (1797) and Tommy Quin (c. 1840). Iona and Peter Opie suggested that it may have had its origins in Tom a lin or Tom o' Lin, the protagonist of another nursery rhyme.

William Stonard's composition

There is also
version
composed as a four-part

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by William Stonard (1585–1630) to the following text:

Reformed versions

The most common modern version is arguably already a moderation of the theme of the original rhyme. The fear that children might be affected by the violence of the rhyme and specifically that children might be tempted to put cats in wells, led to several attempts to reform the rhyme. In his ''New Nursery Rhymes for Old'' (1949) Geoffrey Hall published the following alternative:

References

{{Authority control English nursery rhymes Cats in literature 16th-century songs Songs with unknown songwriters Year of song unknown Songs about cats English children's songs English folk songs Traditional children's songs