Wash the Dishes

"Wash the Dishes" is a lap game for a baby too small to sit up unaided. Six short lines, a rub, a wipe, a tug on the ear, three kisses. The whole performance takes about fifteen seconds, which is roughly the attention span it was built for.

It is frequently listed as one of the oldest rhymes in English, printed in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book of 1744. That claim does not survive checking. The rhyme is not in the 1744 book, and the earliest printing anyone has traced is nearly two centuries later than that.

Origins

The oldest documented appearance of "Wash the dishes, wipe the dishes" is in The Little Mother Goose, published in the United States in 1912 with illustrations by Jessie Willcox Smith. Iona and Peter Opie left it out of The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951) altogether, which is a meaningful silence. The Opies worked the printed record back to the seventeenth century and found room for rhymes far more obscure than this one. When William and Ceil Baring-Gould included it in The Annotated Mother Goose in 1962, they placed it under "Modern Mother Goose", their heading for verses that arrived in the nursery during the twentieth century.

What happened before 1912 is simply not recorded. "Ring the bell for tea" has an English ring to it, since tea as a bell-announced meal belongs more to British households than American ones, but a plausible-sounding phrase is not evidence of anything. The rhyme may have travelled in speech long before someone printed it, or it may be an American verse furnished with British details. No one has demonstrated either, so the honest answer is that its origin is unknown.

The 1744 attribution seems to be a case of a good story outrunning its source. Once one children's website credits a rhyme to the first nursery collection, the claim gets copied, and the copies start looking like corroboration.

Meaning & Interpretation

Nothing is hidden in these lines. The rhyme is a script for touch, and the words exist mainly to time the touching. Its shape is a small bargain: three pieces of housework, then three rewards. Wash, wipe, ring the bell. Wishes, kisses, given.

That structure is the working part. A baby who has heard the rhyme a dozen times learns where it is going and begins grinning somewhere around "three good wishes", well before the kisses land. The anticipation, not the surprise, is what they are enjoying. Pat-a-Cake runs on the same engine, and Round and Round the Garden does too, holding the tickle back until the last word.

The domestic setting is worth noticing. Washing up, drying, and a bell rung for the evening meal describe an ordinary kitchen afternoon, the sort of sequence a baby carried about the house would watch several times a day. The rhyme hands those chores to the child and pays them in kisses.

What is Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book?

It is the earliest surviving collection of English nursery rhymes, published in London by Mary Cooper in May 1744. The surviving book is Volume Two, a tiny illustrated volume printed in red and black containing around forty rhymes, among them "Bah Bah a black Sheep", "Sing a Song of Sixpence", "London Bridge", "Who did kill Cock Robbin" and "Mrs. Mary". Volume One is known only from advertisements and no copy has ever been found. Two copies of Volume Two exist: one in the British Library, long thought to be unique, and a second that surfaced in 2001, sold for £45,000, and is now at the Cotsen Children's Library at Princeton. "Wash the Dishes" is not in it.

How do you play Wash the Dishes with a baby?

Sit the baby facing you and take their hands. On "wash the dishes" rub their palms together or circle their tummy, on "wipe the dishes" wipe the back of each hand, and on "ring the bell for tea" give one ear a very light tug or clap their hands once. Count three fingers for "three good wishes", give three kisses for "three good kisses", and finish with a hug or a tickle. Versions differ from family to family and nursery to nursery, and none of them is the correct one.

Is Wash the Dishes in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes?

No. Iona and Peter Opie did not include it in their 1951 dictionary, the standard reference for the early printed history of English rhymes. Its absence there, combined with its placement under "Modern Mother Goose" in the 1962 Annotated Mother Goose, is the main reason scholars treat it as a twentieth-century rhyme rather than an old one.