"Peter Piper" 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 ...

and well-known

alliteration Alliteration is the repetition of syllable-initial consonant sounds between nearby words, or of syllable-initial vowels if the syllables in question do not start with a consonant. It is often used as a literary device. A common example is " Pe ...

tongue-twister. 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 19745.

Lyrics

The traditional version, as published in John Harris' ''Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation'' in 1813, is: : Peter Piper picked a

peck A peck is an imperial and United States customary unit of dry volume, equivalent to 8 dry quarts or 16 dry pints. An imperial peck is equivalent to 9.09218 liters and a US customary peck is equivalent to 8.80976754172 liters. Four pecks ma ...

of pickled peppers, : A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; : If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, : Where’s the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? A common modern version is: : Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. : If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, : How many pickled peppers did Peter Piper pick : if he picked a peck of pickled peppers? A "

" is a unit of dry volume, with the imperial peck equivalent to a quarter of a

bushel A bushel (abbreviation: bsh. or bu.) is an Imperial unit, imperial and United States customary units, US customary unit of volume, based upon an earlier measure of dry capacity. The old bushel was used mostly for agriculture, agricultural pr ...

. The term is, however, now obsolete in British English.

Origins

The earliest version of this tongue-twister was published in ''Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation'' by John Harris (1756–1846) in London in 1813, which includes a one-name tongue-twister for each letter of the alphabet in the same style. However, the rhyme was apparently known at least a generation earlier. Some authors have identified the subject of the rhyme as Pierre Poivre, an eighteenthcentury French horticulturalist and government administrator of

Mauritius Mauritius, officially the Republic of Mauritius, is an island country in the Indian Ocean, about off the southeastern coast of East Africa, east of Madagascar. It includes the main island (also called Mauritius), as well as Rodrigues, Ag ...

, who once investigated the

Seychelles Seychelles (, ; ), officially the Republic of Seychelles (; Seychellois Creole: ), is an island country and archipelagic state consisting of 155 islands (as per the Constitution) in the Indian Ocean. Its capital and largest city, Victoria, ...

' potential for spice cultivation.

Peter Piper Principle

The Peter Piper Principle is a cognitive error that people make, where they tend to confuse two words that resemble each other; in particular, when the first letter(s) are the same. Studies have shown that this applies when people confuse the names of other people (although other tendencies also apply). Novelists are well aware of the peril of giving two characters names that start with the same letter, because readers have a tendency to get them confused. Names of medications also tend to be confused when they start with the same few letters.

References

External links

Text of ''Peter Piper's Practical Principles of Plain and Perfect Pronunciation''
at

Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital li ...

* {{librivox book , title=Peter Piper Tongue twisters English nursery rhymes English folk songs English children's songs Traditional children's songs Nursery rhymes of uncertain origin Songs based on children's songs Songs about fictional male characters