"Jack Be Nimble" is an

English language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

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 13902.

Lyrics

The most common version of the rhyme is: :Jack be nimble, :Jack be quick, :Jack jump over the candlestick. I. Opie and P. Opie, ''The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes'' (Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 226–7.

Origins and meaning

The rhyme is first recorded in a manuscript of around 1815 and was collected by

James Orchard Halliwell James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps (born James Orchard Halliwell; 21 June 1820 – 3 January 1889) was an English writer, Shakespearean scholar, antiquarian, and a collector of English nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Life The son of Thomas Hal ...

in the mid-nineteenth century. Jumping candlesticks was a form of

fortune telling Fortune telling is the spiritual practice of prediction, predicting information about a person's life.J. Gordon Melton, Melton, J. Gordon. (2008). ''The Encyclopedia of Religious Phenomena''. Visible Ink Press. pp. 115–116. The scope of for ...

and a sport. Good luck was said to be signalled by clearing a candle without extinguishing the flame.

Notes

{{reflist Jack tales English nursery rhymes English poems English folk songs English children's songs Traditional children's songs Songs about fictional male characters