This Little Piggy
"This Little Piggy" | |
---|---|
Nursery rhyme | |
Published | 1760 |
Songwriter(s) | Unknown |
"This Little Piggy" or "This Little Pig" is an English-language nursery rhyme and fingerplay, or, technically, toeplay. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19297.
Lyrics
The most common modern version is:
Words | Fingerplay |
---|---|
This little piggy went to market, |
Wiggle the "big" toe |
The rhyme is usually counted out on an infant or toddler's toes, each line corresponding to a different toe, usually starting with the big toe and ending with the little toe. A foot tickle is added during the "Wee...all the way home" section of the last line.[citation needed] The rhyme can also be seen as a counting rhyme, although the number of each toe (from one for the big toe to five for the little toe) is never stated.[citation needed]
Origins
In 1728, the first line of the rhyme appeared in a medley called "The Nurses Song". The first known full version was recorded in The Famous Tommy Thumb's Little Story-Book, published in London about 1760. In this book, the rhyme goes:[3]
This pig went to market,
That pig stayed home;
This pig had roast meat,
That pig had none;
This pig went to the barn's door,
And cried week, week for more.[4]
The full rhyme continued to appear, with slight variations, in many late 18th- and early 19th-century collections. Until the mid-20th century, the lines referred to "little pigs".[3]
See also
References
- ^ Wentworth, George; Smith, David Eugene (1912). Work and Play with Numbers. Boston: Ginn & Company. p. 14.
- ^ Herman, D. (2007). The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 9.
- ^ a b Opie, I.; Opie, P. (1951). The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1997 ed.). Oxford University Press. pp. 349–50.
- ^ The Famous Tommy Thumb's Little Story-Book. 1760. p. 30.