A rhyme most people can half-remember
“Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace…” is one of those nursery rhymes almost everyone in the English-speaking world half-knows, usually without any idea where it came from or how old it is. It’s a fortune-telling rhyme that gives a child a trait for the day of the week they were born on, running from Monday to Saturday and ending, in the version most people know now, with the child born on the Sabbath day.
Where it was first printed
The earliest known printing is in Anna Eliza Bray’s A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy, published in 1836 (volume II, pages 287–288). Bray wrote the book as a series of letters to the poet Robert Southey, describing the customs, beliefs and folklore of that corner of Devon, in England’s south-west. She introduces the rhyme as “a poetical adage on the subject common in our town” — so it was already in spoken circulation, for some unknown time, before she wrote it down. In 1838 the book was reissued as Traditions, Legends, Superstitions, and Sketches of Devonshire, which is why some references give that title, and sometimes that year.
The idea behind it is older than the verse. The writer Thomas Nashe remembered stories told to children in Suffolk in the 1570s about the luck each of them would have from the day of the week they were born on.
What Bray printed
Bray’s version is not quite the one most people know. It has no Sunday at all:
Monday’s child is fair in face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursday’s child has far to go,
Friday’s child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for its living;
And a child that’s born on a Christmas day,
Is fair and wise, good and gay.
James Orchard Halliwell printed almost the same lines, Christmas Day and all, in his Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of 1849. The Sabbath-day ending came later.
The version most people know, beside Bray’s
| Day | Bray, 1836 | The common modern version |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Fair in face | Fair of face |
| Tuesday | Full of grace | Full of grace |
| Wednesday | Full of woe | Full of woe |
| Thursday | Has far to go | Has far to go |
| Friday | Loving and giving | Loving and giving |
| Saturday | Works hard for its living | Works hard for a living |
| Last lines | “A child that’s born on a Christmas day, / Is fair and wise, good and gay” | “But the child that is born on Sabbath day, / Is bonny and blithe, good and gay” |
The modern wording is the one given in Iona and Peter Opie’s Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes.
The verses aren’t fixed
Other printings move more than the last lines. A version printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1887 gives the woe to Friday’s child instead of Wednesday’s, swaps the fates of Thursday’s and Saturday’s children, and makes Sunday’s child “happy and wise”. A collection of English folk rhymes published in 1892 records one that starts the week on Sunday, with “Sunday’s child is full of grace”, and gives the other days quite different traits. This kind of drift is normal for rhymes passed on by word of mouth: different places, different reciters and different printers each left their mark before anything like a standard text existed. There isn’t a definitive “correct” version to appeal to; there’s the version Bray recorded, and there are the versions printed since.
What the rhyme is, and isn’t
This is a piece of English folklore assigning a whimsical character trait to a day of the week, in the same broad spirit as other fortune-telling rhymes of the period. It has no evidential basis, and nothing about it should be read as predicting anything about a child born on a given day. Reporting the rhyme, its history, and its variants is different from endorsing what it says.
Why it still has a place here
Working out which day of the week a birth date fell on is a purely calendrical fact — no astronomy, astrology, or folklore required, just the mechanics of how the calendar cycles through weekdays. Pairing that day with the rhyme is a bit of harmless historical colour on top of a factual lookup. In that sense it sits alongside other traditions covered on this site, like birth flowers and the language of flowers — a cultural attribution laid over a birth date, reported as what the tradition says rather than as fact.
If you’re curious how unusual your birth date is, as opposed to which day of the week it fell on, the guide How common is your birth date? looks at how unevenly births fall across the calendar year.