9 September 2020
Eeny, meany, miney, moe, with variations in spelling, is a common counting-out rhyme used by children to select sides in a game or to select who is “it” in tag or other such games. The words are simply nonsense syllables, with no intrinsic meaning. Many versions of the rhyme, especially ones from fifty or more years ago, are racist, deploying the n-word, an example of how racism is developed and fostered in young children.
There are numerous variant versions that have been recorded over the years. The headline version presented in the Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes is:
Eena, meena, mina, mo,
Catch a n[——] by the toe;
If he squeals, let him go,
Eena, meena, mina, mo.
The n-word is not found in the earliest versions from the 1850s, but is recorded in the 1880s. The n-word variants appear to have originated in the United States, but quickly spread to other English-speaking countries. The Opies say the n-word in the rhyme was replaced with words like tiger, spider, and beggar in the mid 1970s, but I recall both the n-word and tiger competing during my childhood in the late 1960s, with the n-word version being taboo and transgressive even then. The deliberate suppression of racist versions would seem to have begun somewhat earlier, but non-racist versions have always existed alongside the n-word ones.
There are many different counting-out rhymes. Henry Bolton’s 1888 book on the subject records 877 different counting-out rhymes in a number of languages, dividing the English-language ones into thirteen distinct types. The eeny, meany ones, 78 in total from across the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland, occupy two of these groups, one with the n-word and one without.
In large part because few people bothered to write down what children were saying before the nineteenth century, we can’t say with any certainty how long children have been chanting eeny, meany..., but similar counting-out rhymes have been recorded since the mid nineteenth century. The earliest that I know barely belongs within this group, but it does use the nonsense word eeny. It’s a British version appearing in the journal Notes and Queries in 1854, recollected from the writer’s memory of their childhood of uncertain date:
One-er-y, two-er-y, tick-er-y, seven,
Ak-a-by, crack-a-by, ten, and eleven.
Pin, pan,
Musk-y Dan,
Twiddle-um, twaddle-um, twenty-one.
Black, fish, white, trout,
Ee-ny, o-ny,
You, go, OUT.
Some six months later, in February 1855, another correspondent to Notes and Queries gives the earliest recorded version, from the United States. So, they basic scheme of the rhyme seems to have been well established by then:
Eeeny, meeny moany, mite,
Butter, lather, boney, strike,
Hair, bit, frost, neck,
Harrico, barrico, we, wo, wack.
Eeny, meeny, tipty, te,
Teena, Dinah, Domine,
Hocca, proach, Domma, noach,
Hi, pon, tus.
One-ery, Two-ery, Hickory, Ann,
Filliston, Follaston, Nicholas, John,
Queeby, Quawby, Virgin, Mary,
Singalum, Sangalum, Buck.
William Wells Newell, in his 1883 Games and Songs of American Children, provides three variants from three different states:
(9.) Eny, meny, mony, my,
Tusca, leina, bona, stry,
Kay bell, broken well,
We, wo, wack.
—Massachusetts.
(10.) Eny, meny, mony, mine,
Hasdy, pasky, daily, ine,
Agy, dagy, walk.
—Connecticut.
(11.) Eny, meny, mony, mite,
Butter, lather, bony strike,
Hair cut, froth neck,
Halico balico,
We, wo, wack.
—Philadelphia.
But it is Bolton’s 1888 The Counting-Out Rhymes of Children that provides the most comprehensive overview of differing versions, including the version that I know from my childhood, the first to include the n-word:
600. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo,
Catch a n[——] by the toe;
When he hollers, let him go.
Eeny, meeny, miny, mo.
This is the favorite with American children, actually reported from nearly every State in the Union.
Bolton also reports n-word variants from Scotland and Ireland. According to the Opies, the n-word version, imported from the United States, subsequently became more common in Britain.
Various suggestions have been made as to what the words mean, such as being the first four numbers in some ancient language that have been miraculously preserved among children. Or there is this explanation Fred Jago’s 1882 glossary of the Cornish dialect:
Who would surmise that the talismanic words uttered by our children in their innocent games have come down to us very nearly as perfect as when spoken by the Ancient Briton; but with an opposite and widely different meaning? The only degree of likeness that lies between them now is that where the child of the present day escapes a certain kind of juvenile punishment the retention of the word originally meant DEATH in a most cruel and barbarous way [....] for this is a veritable phrase of great antiquity—“the excommunication of a human being, preparatory to that victim’s death.”
But as we have seen, the eeny, meany version is just one of many, and early versions use all sorts of variations on the line. Explanations like this (Cf. ring around the rosie) tend to focus on one of many versions, assuming that it is the original, and then construct an elaborate story about how the innocence of children masks a deep, dark past. Whenever you run into one of these explanations, you can almost certainly dismiss it as incorrect, and in this case, the explanation is simple: nonsense syllables.
It is true that children’s chants incorporate words and phrases from popular culture, and these phrases will spread beyond the reach of the original context in both time and place, until the meaning is forgotten. But these phrasings are almost invariably fragments in longer rhymes, and those longer rhymes rarely have connections to the distant past.
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