Monday's Child

Days of the week

In the form usually printed today, “Monday's Child” gives each day of the week a line of its own. It is English nursery-rhyme folklore, first printed in 1836 — not a claim about anyone actually born on that day.

“Monday's Child” was first printed by Anna Eliza Bray in A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy (1836), and was older than that in speech.

The lines are the rhyme as it is usually printed today, as Iona and Peter Opie give it in The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (1951). Bray's 1836 text differs in small ways and has no line for Sunday — it ends with the child born on Christmas Day — and each day's page gives her line beside today's.

Where the rhyme comes from, and how the verses vary →