"Hickory Dickory Dock" or "Hickety Dickety Dock" is a popular English-language

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 ...

. The

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 is "6489".

Lyrics and music

The most common modern version is:

Hickory dickory dock. The mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one, The mouse ran down, Hickory dickory dock.

Other variants include "down the mouse ran" or "down the mouse run" or "and down he ran" or "and down he run" in place of "the mouse ran down". Other variants have non-sequential numbers, for example starting with "The clock struck ten, The mouse ran down" instead of the traditional "one".

Score

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Origins and meaning

Hickety Dickety Dock 2 - WW Denslow - Project Gutenberg etext 18546

The earliest recorded version of the rhyme is in ''

Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book ''Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song-Book'' is the oldest extant anthology of English nursery rhymes, published in London in 1744. It contains the oldest printed texts of many well-known and popular rhymes, as well as several that eventually dropped out o ...

'', published in London in May 1744, which uses the opening line: 'Hickere, Dickere Dock'. The next recorded version in ''Mother Goose's Melody'' (c. 1765), uses 'Dickery, Dickery Dock'. The rhyme is thought by some commentators to have originated as a

counting-out rhyme A counting-out game or counting-out rhyme is a simple method of 'randomly' selecting a person from a group, often used by children for the purpose of playing another game. It usually requires no materials, and is achieved with spoken words or hand ...

. Westmorland shepherds in the nineteenth century used the numbers ''Hevera'' (8), ''Devera'' (9) and ''Dick'' (10) which are from the language

Cumbric Cumbric is an extinct Celtic language of the Brittonic subgroup spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the ''Hen Ogledd'' or "Old North", in Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands. It was closely related to Old Welsh and the ot ...

. The rhyme is thought to have been based on the

astronomical clock An astronomical clock, horologium, or orloj is a clock with special mechanisms and dials to display astronomical information, such as the relative positions of the Sun, Moon, zodiacal constellations, and sometimes major planets. Definition ...

Exeter Cathedral Exeter Cathedral, properly known as the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter in Exeter, is an Anglican cathedral, and the seat of the Bishop of Exeter, in the city status in the United Kingdom, city of Exeter, Devon, in South West England. The presen ...

. The clock has a small hole in the door below the face for the resident cat to hunt mice.Cathedral Cats. Richard Surman. HarperCollins. 2004

References

External links

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Hickory Dickory Dock Origin
{{authority control 1744 songs English children's songs English folk songs Songs about mice and rats Fictional mice and rats Fictional objects English nursery rhymes Songs with unknown songwriters Traditional children's songs

Lyrics and music

Score

Origins and meaning

See also

References

External links