Nursery Rhymes

This Little Piggy

Where the rhyme comes from

The pigs are older than most people guess. According to Iona and Peter Opie’s The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the standard scholarly account of the canon, the rhyme’s first line turns up in 1728, in a medley called “The Nurses Song”. The first full version they record comes a generation later, in The Famous Tommy Thumb’s Little Story-Book, published in London around 1760 — and there the pigs are not yet little:

“This pig went to market, / That pig stayed home; / This pig had roast meat, / That pig had none; / This pig went to the barn’s door, / And cried week, week for more.”

The surprise is the ending. No one runs all the way home: the last pig goes to the barn door and squeals “week, week” for more, which is a fair imitation of a hungry pig. The rhyme went on appearing, with slight variations, in many collections of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and until the mid-twentieth century the lines spoke of “little pigs”. The diminutive “piggy” and the “wee, wee, wee, all the way home” ending became the usual wording only after that. Along the way the rhyme was taken up by Sabine Baring-Gould in A Book of Nursery Songs and Rhymes (1895) and by Charles Welsh in A Book of Nursery Rhymes (1901), and Beatrix Potter printed a version, “This pig went to market”, in Cecily Parsley’s Nursery Rhymes (1922). It is catalogued in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 19297.

What does it mean?

The honest answer is that This Little Piggy is a game, and its meaning is in the playing: five toes, five pigs, five small fortunes, and a squealing dash that ends in a tickle. Folklorists class it as a fingerplay, and nothing in its printed history points to anything darker.

The “dark meaning”. Ask now what the rhyme really means and the internet has a dark answer ready: the pig that went to market was going to be sold for slaughter, and the one tucking into a roast dinner was eating something it would rather not know about. It is a neat piece of gallows humour — but it is a modern reading, and there is no evidence behind it. It circulates in blog posts of the 2020s, repeated from one post to the next without a source. None of the early printings hints at it, and the scholarly history of the rhyme, the Opies’ included, attaches no such meaning to it. Pigs do go to market, of course; nothing in the rhyme’s history says that is the point.

Sharing it with children

This is a rhyme for the very youngest, and it needs nothing but a bare foot. Start with the big toe and give each toe a gentle wiggle as its pig goes to market, stays home, has its roast beef or goes without. On the last line, let your fingers run from the little toe up the leg, all the way home to a tickle under the chin or the arm. The pause before the run is half the fun — a baby who knows the rhyme will start squirming in anticipation by the fourth pig.

Bath time and bedtime are natural moments for it: socks off, one foot and then the other, which neatly doubles the rhyme. Older toddlers who are wary of having their feet handled can play it on their fingers instead, starting with the thumb, and before long will want to do it to you. And because there are exactly five pigs, it makes a gentle first counting rhyme — count the toes aloud as you go, “one little piggy, two little piggies”, then count them back again from five once that feels easy.

Extra verses to sing

These verses aren’t traditional — they’re ours. Play them on the other foot, or when ten toes are not enough.

More rhymes to explore

• Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son — another eighteenth-century pig, and a far less lucky one
• Diddle Diddle Dumpling — more bedtime business with feet: one shoe off, and the other shoe on
• Little Boy Blue — another farmyard rhyme, with sheep and cows in place of pigs