Wishing well
well where wishes are thought to be granted
A wishing well is a well, or other water feature such as a fountain or spring, into which people throw coins or small objects and make a wish. In Europe, versions of the practice date back at least to Roman times, when it was common practice to place coins in springs and wells as offerings. According to the folklorist Robert Charles Hope, wishing wells can thus be considered "a curious survival" from "remote antiquity". The Oxford English Dictionary reports that the earliest recorded use of the term wishing well dates to 1791.
Although coins are in modern times the most common item placed into wishing wells, this was not always the case. Historically, other items were used, such as stones, shells, beads, buttons, food, rags, needles, and nails. In Britain and Ireland, pins were an especially popular object for the purpose, and they were often bent before being tossed.
Wishing wells have been reported around the world, including in some non-Western cultures. They are related to other superstitious and religious objects, such as holy wells, healing wells, and oracular wells (i.e. wells used for divination).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q573342. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1791.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wishing well” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.