This Little Piggy
18th century nursery rhyme
"This Little Pig Went to Market" (often shortened to "This Little Piggy") is an English-language nursery rhyme and fingerplay. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19297.
Lyrics
The rhyme is usually counted out on an infant or toddler's toes, each line corresponding to a different toe, usually starting with the big toe and ending with the little toe.
One popular version is:
Origins
In 1728, the first line of the rhyme appeared in a medley called "The Nurses Song". The first known full version was recorded in The Famous Tommy Thumb's Little Story-Book, published in London about 1760. In this book, the rhyme goes:
The full rhyme continued to appear, with slight variations, in many late 18th- and early 19th-century collections. Until the mid-20th century, the lines referred to "little pigs". It was the eighth most popular nursery rhyme in a 2009 survey in the United Kingdom.
The public source identifies “This Little Piggy” as 18th century nursery rhyme. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Little, Piggy and 18th.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “This Little Piggy”, the useful work is to connect “18th century nursery rhyme” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7786113. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1728, 1760 and 2009.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “This Little Piggy” 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.