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Nursery Rhymes Through History

Every nursery rhyme has two ages: the day it was born and the day someone finally wrote it down. Because these songs travelled by ear for years, sometimes centuries, the dates on this page mark the second, not the first. They are the earliest points at which each rhyme can be proven to exist. We have gathered every rhyme in our collection that carries a firm date and lined them up century by century.

That comes to 304 rhymes in all. The oldest with a solid date is "Early to Bed" (1496); the most recent is "Baby Shark" (2016). In between, the record thickens fast: a trickle in the Tudor years, a surge through the 1700s as the first children's collections went to press, and a peak in the 1800s, when Victorian folklorists set out to save the old verses before they were forgotten.

Read straight through, the timeline doubles as a short history of childhood itself, from spoken folk song to printed page to purpose-written classroom song. For the deeper stories behind these verses, see the history of nursery rhymes, the ranked oldest nursery rhymes, and the dark origins hiding behind some of the most familiar ones. Pick a century below to see which rhymes belong to it and when each first reached the written record.

The 1400s: The Edge of the Written Record

Almost nothing from the medieval nursery survives with a date attached, because these songs lived in speech long before anyone thought to write them down. The one entry we can pin to the 1400s is a proverb of health and thrift first recorded in 1496. For a rhyme that reaches back even further, see our list of the oldest nursery rhymes, which is topped by an older French round.

The 1500s: First Appearances in Print

As printing spread through Tudor England, a handful of rhymes left their first paper trail. A courtship song turns up around 1549, the calendar rhyme "Thirty Days Hath September" follows in 1562, and by 1580 "Ding Dong Bell", noted by the organist John Lant, is on record.

The 1600s: Songbooks and Ballads

The seventeenth century filled out with rhymes preserved in music books and ballad sheets. "Three Blind Mice" appears in the 1609 songbook Deuteromelia, and market chants, counting games and courtship songs join it across the decades. Each is an early snapshot, caught only because someone happened to print it.

The 1700s: The First Collections for Children

This is the century when nursery rhymes became a genre of their own. Two years dominate the cluster: 1744, when Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book became the first known collection made for children, and 1765, when John Newbery's Mother Goose's Melody fixed the Mother Goose name. Classics like "Baa Baa Black Sheep", "Hickory Dickory Dock" and "Jack and Jill" all trace their first printing to these books.

The 1800s: The Victorian Collectors

More rhymes carry an 1800s date than any other century, and much of that is down to the Victorian folklorists who combed Britain for verses to save. A large group first appears in the collections of the 1840s, while others were written on purpose for children, such as "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", drawn from Jane Taylor's 1806 poem. This is also when American rhymes like "Mary Had a Little Lamb" enter the record.

The 1900s: Written to Be Sung

By the twentieth century, most new entries were composed on purpose, often for records, radio and the classroom. "The Wheels on the Bus" and "I'm a Little Teapot" both date to the late 1930s, and American songwriters account for much of the list.

The 2000s and Beyond

The tradition is still growing. The most recent rhyme we can date reached the record in 2016, a reminder that the nursery songbook never really closes.

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