There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe
"There was an Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe" is a popular English language nursery rhyme, with a Roud Folk Song Index number of 19132. Debates over its meaning and origin have largely centered on attempts to match the old woman with historical female figures who have had large families, although King George II (1683–1760) has also been proposed as the rhyme's subject. Lyrics The most common version of the rhyme is: The earliest printed version in Joseph Ritson's Gammer Gurton's Garland in 1784 has the coarser last line: Many other variations were printed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Marjorie Ainsworth Decker published a Christian version of the rhyme in her The Christian Mother Goose Book published in 1978: Origins and meaning Iona and Peter Opie pointed to the version published in Infant Institutes in 1797, which finished with the lines: The term "a-loffeing", they believe, was Shakespearean, suggesting that the rhyme is considerably older than the first printed versions. They then speculated that if this were true, it might have a folklore meaning and pointed to the connection between shoes and fertility, perhaps exemplified by casting a shoe after a bride as she leaves for her honeymoon,