A Diller, a Dollar

The rhyme is sarcasm, and the sarcasm is what most modern readers miss. A "scholar" here is not a professor. In older English the word simply meant a pupil, a boy at school, and this particular boy has a reputation for strolling in at ten. The speaker asks why he has come "so soon" and then answers the question in the same breath: he used to arrive at ten, and now he arrives at noon. He is not improving. He is getting worse, and the adult voice is needling him for it.

Ten o'clock was already outrageous. English schools of the period ran on daylight rather than clocks, and grammar schools commonly opened at six in the morning in summer and seven in winter, breaking for breakfast and running on into the late afternoon. A boy who turned up at ten had already missed several hours of the day. A boy who turned up at noon had missed most of it.

Origins

The verse was first printed in Gammer Gurton's Garland, or The Nursery Parnassus, the collection put together by the antiquary Joseph Ritson and issued as a chapbook by the Stockton-on-Tees bookseller R. Christopher in 1784. That first edition held around seventy-nine rhymes. The expanded four-part London edition of 1810, assembled after Ritson's death with the antiquary Francis Douce, prints the verse in Part II under the heading "A diller, a doller", ending "You us'd to come at ten o'clock, / And now you come at noon."

Gammer Gurton's Garland is one of the founding documents of the printed nursery rhyme, standing with Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book of the 1740s. Its pages carry very early appearances of "Hey diddle diddle", "Baa, baa, black sheep", "There was an old woman who lived in a shoe", "London Bridge is broken down", "Hickory dickory dock", "Jack and Gill" and "Hark, hark, the dogs do bark". The later expanded parts add the first known printings of "Humpty Dumpty" and "Little Bo-Peep". The title is a joke for adults: "gammer" is an old dialect word for an elderly countrywoman, the female counterpart of "gaffer", and Gammer Gurton was already a familiar name from the Tudor comedy Gammer Gurton's Needle.

Meaning & Interpretation

Nobody can say for certain what "diller" means, and any source that sounds completely confident about it is overstating the evidence. The word does not appear in ordinary English outside this rhyme. Iona and Peter Opie, whose Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes is the standard reference, suggested it may be a compression of "dilatory" or "dullard", or a relative of "dilly-dally". Northern English dialect glossaries record "diller" as a term for a dull or slow-witted boy, which fits the rhyme's target neatly. All of those readings point the same direction, at a dawdler, but none of them is a proven derivation.

"Dollar" is easier to explain and much less interesting. Early printings spell it "doller", sitting between "diller" and "scholar" as a run of matched sounds. English did use "dollar" for foreign silver coins in the 1700s, but there is no money anywhere in the rhyme and no reason to look for any. The opening line is mouth-music, a bit of patter to set the beat before the real line arrives.

That two-word nonsense opening is doing something else too. It buys the speaker a moment of mock ceremony before the sting, the verbal equivalent of a slow throat-clearing before a telling-off. The rhyme is very short, and almost half of it is setup.

What does "a diller, a dollar" mean?

No definitive meaning has ever been established. "Diller" is generally read as a word for a dawdler or a dullard, either shortened from "dilatory" or "dullard" as the Opies proposed, or drawn from northern dialect, where "diller" is recorded for a dull or slow boy. "Dollar" appears to be there purely for the rhyme with "scholar" and was spelled "doller" in early printings. The honest answer is that the phrase is best treated as playful nonsense with a hint of insult in it.

Why is ten o'clock late for a scholar?

Because school days in the 1700s started at dawn. Grammar schools typically opened around six in the morning in summer and seven in winter, so a pupil arriving at ten had already lost half the working day. The rhyme then makes it worse by revealing that ten was his old habit and noon is his new one.

Why does the rhyme ask "What makes you come so soon?"

It is a sarcastic question, not a real one. The speaker is pretending to be surprised at the boy's early arrival, then immediately undercuts the pretence with the last two lines. The joke depends on the listener understanding that "so soon" means the opposite of what it says.

What is Gammer Gurton's Garland?

It is a collection of English nursery rhymes compiled by Joseph Ritson and first published as a small chapbook in 1784, later reprinted in expanded editions through the nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest printed sources for dozens of rhymes still sung today, and for several of them, including this one, it is the earliest known appearance in print.