Nursery rhyme

A nursery rhyme is a traditional poem or song for children in Britain and many other countries, but usage of the term dates only from the late 18th/early 19th century. The term Mother Goose rhymes is interchangeable with nursery rhymes.^[1]

This article is about the traditional poems or songs for children. For a Japanese galgame, see Nursery Rhyme (visual novel).

From the mid-16th century nursery rhymes began to be recorded in English plays, and most popular rhymes date from the 17th and 18th centuries.^[2] The first English collections, Tommy Thumb's Song Book and a sequel, Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, were published by Mary Cooper in 1744. Publisher John Newbery's stepson, Thomas Carnan, was the first to use the term Mother Goose for nursery rhymes when he published a compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradle (London, 1780).^{[note 1]}

Carpenter, H.; Prichard, M. (1984). . Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-211582-9.

The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature

; Opie, Peter (1997) [1951]. The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Opie, Ilona

Opie, Ilona (2004). "Playground rhymes and the oral tradition". In P. Hunt; S. G. Bannister Ray (eds.). International Companion Encyclopedia of Children's Literature. London: Routledge.

Sources

Media related to Nursery rhymes at Wikimedia Commons