Nursery Rhyme Trivia
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119 free Nursery Rhyme trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
68 free nursery rhyme trivia questions with answers. Everyone knows nursery rhymes, and almost nobody knows anything about them. This quiz covers both halves: the words themselves (what did Jack and Jill fetch, how many bags of wool, who put pussy in the well) and the surprisingly murky history behind them, from the woman who wrote Mary Had a Little Lamb to the pub in Pop Goes the Weasel and the plague theory that folklorists have quietly thrown out. The easy questions work for a family quiz or a baby-shower game; the harder ones will catch out anyone who thinks Humpty Dumpty was a cannon. It also makes a good round for a pub quiz, since everyone in the room will be sure they know the answers. Every question was checked against the standard references (chiefly the Opies' Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes as summarised on Wikipedia), so the 'hidden meaning' questions distinguish between what is documented and what is just a good story.
30 of 119 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who could not put Humpty Dumpty together again?
All the king's horses and all the king's men
All the king's horses and all the king's men can't mend him, yet the rhyme never says what he is: it probably began as a riddle, and the answer was an egg.
Q 02Which author turned Humpty Dumpty into a talking egg in an 1871 book?
Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll put him in Through the Looking-Glass, where Humpty tells Alice that a word means just what he chooses it to mean, neither more nor less.
Q 03In 18th-century English slang, what kind of person was called a 'humpty dumpty'?
A short, clumsy person
A short, clumsy person, in Francis Grose's slang dictionary of 1785. The words had named a drink before that, ale boiled with brandy, and only later an egg.
Q 04An unproven story says Humpty Dumpty was a Royalist cannon in which English town's siege of 1648?
Colchester
Colchester. In the tale, Parliament's guns blast a Royalist cannon off the town wall, but the rhyme is not found in print until around 1800, a century and a half after the siege.
Q 05What did Jack and Jill go up the hill to fetch?
A pail of water
A pail of water. Climbing a hill for it may not be so odd: dew ponds were dug on hilltops, and they held water through droughts when the ponds in the valley failed.
Q 06The earliest printed 'Jack and Jill' pictured the pair as what?
Two boys
Two boys, which is odd, because the two names had long stood for any lad and his lass: 'Jack shall have Jill', Puck promises in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Q 07In a later verse of 'Jack and Jill', what does Jack use to mend his head?
Vinegar and brown paper
Vinegar and brown paper sounds like nonsense but was a real household remedy: The Old Farmer's Almanack was still calling it good for a bruise in 1892.
Q 08Sarah Josepha Hale, who published 'Mary Had a Little Lamb', later campaigned to make which holiday national?
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving. Hale began pressing for it in 1846 and kept at it for 17 years, until Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of thanks in 1863.
Q 09'Mary Had a Little Lamb' was the first thing recorded on which invention?
Thomas Edison's phonograph
Thomas Edison's phonograph got its first test in 1877 when he spoke the rhyme at a cylinder wrapped in tinfoil and, to his amazement, the machine played his words back.
Q 10Which industrialist moved the schoolhouse claimed for 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' to Sudbury, Massachusetts, in the 1920s?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford had the Redstone School hauled about 20 miles to his Wayside Inn estate, then reopened it in 1927 as a working school that taught children until 1951.
Q 11Which nursery rhyme began as an 1806 poem by Jane Taylor?
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star
Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Jane Taylor wrote it as a poem called 'The Star', not a song: words and tune are first found together in an 1838 songbook, fourteen years after she died.
Q 12Which composer wrote twelve piano variations on the French melody used for 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star'?
Mozart
Mozart was long thought to have picked the tune up in Paris in 1778, but his manuscript points to 1781 or 1782, and the set was published in Vienna in 1785.
Q 13Which Alice in Wonderland character recites the parody 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Bat'?
The Mad Hatter
Q 21'Ring a Ring o' Roses' is often said to be about which disaster, a link folklorists reject?
The plague
The plague. Folklorists reject the link: the rhyme is not found in print before the 19th century, and no one is known to have tied it to the plague until the mid-20th.
Q 22'London Bridge Is Falling Down' may recall an attack around 1014 by which future king of Norway?
Olaf II
Olaf II. In the saga his ships loop cables around the bridge's piles and row downstream until it gives way, and an 1844 English translation of the victory verse begins 'London Bridge is broken down'.
Q 23In 'Hickory Dickory Dock', what does the mouse do when the clock strikes one?
Runs down
The Mad Hatter says he sang it at the Queen of Hearts' concert, where she bawled that he was murdering the time; ever since, he tells Alice, it has always been six o'clock.
Q 14In 1951 the BBC recorded 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' being played by which new kind of machine?
A computer
A computer. The BBC caught the Ferranti Mark 1 in Alan Turing's Manchester lab playing the rhyme, and when it stalled partway through 'In the Mood' the presenter laughed that the machine was 'obviously not in the mood'.
Q 15One theory says 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' was a complaint about what?
A medieval tax
A medieval tax. The theory points to the wool duty Edward I imposed in 1275, yet no trace of the rhyme is found in print until hundreds of years later.
Q 16In 'Hey Diddle Diddle', which animal jumped over the moon?
The cow
The cow. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote a long spoof 'original' of the rhyme, and in The Lord of the Rings Frodo climbs on a table at the Prancing Pony inn to sing it.
Q 17What was Little Miss Muffet eating when the spider arrived?
Curds and whey
Curds and whey. She is sometimes said to be the daughter of Thomas Muffet, a Tudor doctor who studied spiders, but he died about two centuries before the rhyme is first recorded.
Q 18Often drawn as a stool, the 'tuffet' in 'Little Miss Muffet' may first have meant what?
Grassy mound
A grassy mound, a sense related to 'tuft'. The Oxford English Dictionary calls the stool meaning doubtful and suggests it may have come from people misreading the rhyme itself.
Q 19After his pipe and his bowl, who did Old King Cole call for?
Fiddlers
His fiddlers three. In the oldest surviving version 'Good King Cole' calls only for his bowl and his fiddlers: the pipe came later.
Q 20Legend made King Coel, sometimes claimed as Old King Cole, father of Saint Helena and grandfather of which emperor?
Constantine
Constantine. In Geoffrey of Monmouth's 12th-century telling, the Roman senator Constantius comes to subdue Coel, makes peace instead, and marries his daughter Helena, famed for her skill in music.
Runs down. Exeter Cathedral lays claim to the rhyme: the door below its 15th-century clock has a hole cut in it, said to be for the bishop's cat to chase mice.
Q 24In 'Three Blind Mice', what does the farmer's wife use to cut off their tails?
A carving knife
A carving knife. The version printed in 1609 has no farmer's wife and no tails: it sings of 'Dame Julian, the miller and his merry old wife', who scrapes her tripe.
Q 25'Three Blind Mice' has been read as a reference to which monarch executing three bishops?
Mary I
Mary I. The reading falls apart on the details: her bishops Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer were burned at the stake, not blinded, and the earliest lyrics do the mice no harm at all.
Q 26What is Little Bo-Peep told to do about her lost sheep?
Leave them alone and they'll come home
Leave them alone and they'll come home. In later verses she finds them without their tails, which have been hung up to dry, and she tries to fix each one back on.
Q 27Jack Sprat could eat no fat, so what could his wife not eat?
Lean
Lean. It was a proverb for grown-ups first: a 1639 collection has Jack eating no fat while his partner 'doth love no leane', so 'betwixt them both they lick the dishes cleane'.
Q 28Where did Old Mother Hubbard go to fetch her poor dog a bone?
The cupboard
The cupboard. The joke goes on for verses: she fetches the dog a coffin from the undertaker's and comes back to find him laughing.
Q 29What did Little Jack Horner pull out of his Christmas pie?
A plum
A plum. Adults soon made him a byword for helping yourself: an 18th-century epigram asks what officials are 'but Jack Horners, who snug in their corners, cut freely the public pie'.
Q 30The 'real' Jack Horner was said to be steward to the last abbot of which abbey?
Glastonbury
Glastonbury. The tale has him open a pie meant for Henry VIII and pull out the deeds to the manor of Mells, but the Horner family kept a deed showing the price he paid for it.