A rhyme with a job
Counting-out rhymes have a practical purpose: they choose one person from a group without argument. A child points at each player in turn, one word or beat per player, and whoever lands on the last word is “it,” or is out, or goes first. Because the result depends on how many players there are and where the count starts, it feels impartial even though the caller could, with some skill, influence it. That sense of fairness is probably why the habit is so widespread.
The best-known English example begins “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” Versions exist across Europe and in many other places, with different words and endings. The sounds often resemble numbers without being numbers, which is the part of the story that interests historians of counting.
What the records show
Collecting children’s rhymes in a serious way began in the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth century folklorists were comparing versions across countries. The best known British study, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie, published in 1959, recorded many counting-out rhymes in use in schools and playgrounds and noted how widely they varied from place to place.
Several features stand out from collections like these:
- The rhymes are old enough that nobody can name an author, and the earliest printed versions give only a snapshot of something already circulating by word of mouth.
- Many exist in near-identical forms in different languages. A German variant, for example, starts with something like “Ene, mene, mu,” which suggests either a shared source or long borrowing between neighbours.
- The wording changes constantly. Children adapt a line to local words or invent a new ending, so there is no single original text to recover.
- Some versions recorded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries used offensive words about specific groups. Those lines are generally replaced today, and they say more about the society that produced them than about the rhyme’s origin.
The number-word theory
The most discussed idea is that the nonsense syllables are worn-down number words. Under this view, “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” could descend from a count of one, two, three, four in some older language, ground down through centuries of repetition by children who did not need the meaning. Several scholars have proposed versions of this idea, often pointing to the rhythm and the way such rhymes seem to count to a fixed length.
The strongest support comes from a different tradition. Shepherds and knitters in parts of northern England, and in other areas where Celtic languages once dominated, used counting sequences such as yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp, sethera, lethera, hovera, dovera, dick for one to ten. These words resemble old Brythonic Celtic numerals, such as Welsh un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump (one, two, three, four, five), and they were used for tallying sheep, stitches or other items, usually counting to twenty and then marking a score with a pebble or notch. This kind of tally links to base twenty counting, a pattern in several languages. Some folklorists suggested that nonsense rhymes elsewhere, including “Hickory, dickory, dock” and “Eeny, meeny,” might descend from sequences of this type.
The honest conclusion is that the idea is plausible for some rhymes and unproven for others. Number words are well known to survive in fossilised forms, and the Indo-European numerals share recognisable roots across many languages, so a worn-down count is not far-fetched. But resemblance alone is not proof, and children are very good at inventing nonsense with a counting rhythm. Rhymes can borrow the sound of a count without ever having been one.
Claims that lack evidence
A popular story says counting-out rhymes began as ancient sacrificial rituals, in which druids or priests chose victims by chanting. This claim appears in many books and websites, but there is no good evidence for it. It has the feel of a tidy explanation, and it is better treated as legend.
Other ideas fare better but are also uncertain. Some scholars propose that counting-out began as a way of settling who would take the first turn in a game, a use that appears wherever children play together, with no need of a ritual origin.
The odd and the even
The mechanics are worth a moment. In a simple version, a rhyme of a given number of beats is chanted while pointing around a circle, and the person pointed to on the last beat is chosen. Players learn quickly that changing the starting point or adding a beat changes the outcome. Many children’s rhymes include a final “out” tag, so that the count repeats until one player remains. Others use an odd-versus-even test, which echoes the old odd number luck beliefs about odd counts being more fortunate. The principle is one of fair division without arithmetic.
Counting-out rhymes belong with other number-based children’s verses, including the nursery rhyme numbers that appear in songs and games. Like them, they preserve words and rhythms that adults rarely notice. Whether or not the nonsense syllables are the faint remains of ancient number words, the rhymes show how counting can be turned into a game, and how a practical need for fairness produces a ritual that children hand to each other with little help from adults.