Handy Dandy

A poet writing in England in the 1370s used the words "handy dandy" and expected his readers to know what he meant. The game he was pointing at is the one a parent can start right now with a button and two closed hands. That is the unusual thing about this rhyme. The verse itself is two lines long and changes wording from county to county, but the name of the game has survived, in print, for roughly six hundred and fifty years.

The play is simple enough for a toddler who cannot yet talk. Hide something small in one fist, mix your hands up out of sight, hold out both, and let the child point. Then open the chosen hand. Children who have only just worked out that objects still exist when hidden find this genuinely thrilling, and they will ask for it again and again.

Origins

The earliest known appearance is in William Langland's long allegorical poem Piers Plowman. In the B text, written around 1378, Passus IV contains the line "To maken his pees with his pens, handy dandy payed", describing a character trying to buy his way out of serious criminal charges. The poem exists in several versions written across the 1360s and 1370s, and no version records the children's rhyme itself, only the name.

Shakespeare used it too. In King Lear, written around 1605 and first printed in 1608, the mad king tells Gloucester to picture a judge and a thief swapping places: "Change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?" The line only works if an audience already understood the game as a fifty-fifty guess between two identical options, which by 1605 it plainly did.

What is missing is a first printing of the nursery text. The couplets above come from later English collections of nursery rhymes, mostly nineteenth century, and folklorists recorded several different wordings from different regions. Because of that gap, this page carries no single date. The game is documented from the fourteenth century; the words children say over it are documented much later, and were probably never fixed in the first place.

Meaning & Interpretation

"Handy dandy" is a reduplication, a phrase built by repeating a word with a small sound change, like helter skelter or hocus pocus. English nursery language is full of them, and they tend to be sturdy: the shape is easy to say and hard to forget, which is likely part of why this one lasted.

The shift in meaning is the interesting part. In Langland the phrase does not describe play at all. It describes a bribe. Money moves quietly from one hand to another and the transaction is not meant to be seen, exactly like the object concealed in the closed fist. From there the phrase became a general term for underhand dealing, and Shakespeare's use in King Lear sits between the two senses, invoking the children's game to make a bitter point about corrupt justice.

How old is Handy Dandy?

The name is documented from around 1378, when William Langland used "handy dandy" in the B text of Piers Plowman, which makes it one of the oldest named children's games in English. Shakespeare used it again in King Lear about 230 years later. The rhyme's actual words, however, were not printed until the era of published nursery rhyme collections, and several regional versions exist, so no single origin date can be given for the verse.

How do you play Handy Dandy?

Take a small object the child can see clearly, such as a button, a coin, a pebble, or a raisin. Show it to them, then put both hands behind your back and move the object between your fists a few times so they cannot follow it. Bring out two closed fists, either side by side or stacked one on top of the other, and say the rhyme. The child guesses by pointing at or tapping a hand. Open that hand. If they were right, they win the object; if not, show them where it was and go again. Older children take turns hiding it themselves, which is usually when the game gets funnier, because young hiders are terrible at keeping a straight face.

Did handy dandy really mean bribery?

Yes, in Langland's usage. The Piers Plowman line describes a defendant paying "handy dandy" to make his peace, in a passage about buying off a criminal case, and the phrase carried a sense of money passed secretly between hands. The literal children's game and the figurative sense of underhand payment sit side by side in early English, and Shakespeare's King Lear line plays on both at once.

Is Handy Dandy the same as Handy Spandy, Jack-a-Dandy?

No. "Handy Spandy, Jack-a-Dandy" is a separate rhyme about a boy who loves plum cake and sugar candy, and it has nothing to do with guessing which hand holds an object. The two get confused because the opening sounds are so close. Handy Dandy is the hiding game; Handy Spandy is a character sketch.