Ring a Ring o' Roses

"Ring a Ring o' Roses"
Musical variations of '"Ring a Ring o' Roses", Alice Gomme, 1898.
Nursery rhyme
Published	1881
Audio samples  Play Marlborough   Yorkshire   Sporle A   Sporle B

"Ring a Ring o' Roses" or "Ring Around the Rosie" or "Ring a Ring o' Rosie" is a nursery rhyme or folksong and playground singing game. It first appeared in print in 1881, but it is reported that a version was already being sung to the current tune in the 1790s and similar rhymes are known from across Europe. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 7925. Urban legend says the song originally described the plague, specifically the Great Plague of London, or the Black Death, but folklorists reject this idea.

It is unknown what the earliest version of the rhyme was or when it began. Many incarnations of the game have a group of children form a ring, dance in a circle around a person, and stoop or curtsy with the final line. The slowest child to do so is faced with a penalty or becomes the "rosie" (literally: rose tree) from the French rosier) and takes their place in the center of the ring.

Variations, corruptions, and vulgarized versions were noted to be in use long before the earliest printed publications. One such variation was dated to be in use in Connecticut in the 1840s.

Common British versions include:

Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.

Cows in the meadows
Eating buttercups
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all jump up.

Common American versions include:

Ring-a-round the rosie,
A pocket full of posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.

The last two lines are sometimes varied to:

Hush! Hush! Hush! Hush!
We've all tumbled down.

The first printing of the rhyme was in Kate Greenaway's 1881 edition of Mother Goose; or, the Old Nursery Rhymes:

Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.

A novel of 1855, The Old Homestead by Ann S. Stephens, describes children playing "Ring, ring a rosy" in New York.William Wells Newell reports two versions in America a short time later (1883) and says that another was known in New Bedford, Massachusetts around 1790: