Humpty Dumpty is a character in a nursery rhyme typically portrayed as an egg. Most English-speaking children are familiar with the rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 13026.
The most common text is:
The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg because it was originally posed as a riddle, first published in 1810 as such:
It probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century...
more
Humpty Dumpty is a character in a nursery rhyme typically portrayed as an egg. Most English-speaking children are familiar with the rhyme. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 13026.
The most common text is:
The rhyme does not explicitly state that the subject is an egg because it was originally posed as a riddle, first published in 1810 as such:
It probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. The riddle may depend on the assumption that, whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as Boule Boule in French, or Lille Trille in Swedish and Norwegian; though none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term "humpty dumpty"...
less
