Is it safe?
Dear Word Detective: Don’t know if I’m spelling this correctly, but I’d like to know the origin of the “Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free” shouted by children playing the ancient game of tag. — Carol.
Ah yes, the ancient game of tag. Isn’t there an iPhone app for that now? Apparently there’s now one for solving Sudoku puzzles. You’ll notice that I didn’t say for “playing” Sudoku. No, with this “app,” you just point your phone’s camera at the puzzle and it uses artificial intelligence to solve it for you. Whee! Incidentally, the American Dialect Society (ADS), the linguists and scholars who study and document American English as it is actually spoken, voted at their annual meeting this month to declare “app” (short for “application,” a software program that runs on a computer, telephone, etc.) as the ADS Word of the Year for 2010. Runners-up included “nom” (“Onomatopoetic form connoting eating, especially pleasurably”), “junk” in a number of senses, “Wikileaks,” and “trend” as a verb. “Refudiate” won the “Most Unnecessary” category hands down.
I was never a big fan of playing “Tag” because I was a small, weedy child and consequently spent a disproportionate amount of time being “It.” “Hide and Seek,” where children hide from the child designated “It,” at least gave me the opportunity to get some reading done behind the couch. It’s when “It” finds one of the hiders, of course, that the found child becomes “It” and the game restarts. “Ollie ollie oxen free” is traditionally shouted at this point by the old “It” to let the other players know that they should emerge from their hiding places and start the game over. So the “Ollie” shout is really from Hide and Seek, not Tag.
“Ollie ollie oxen free” is part of what Iona and Peter Opie, in their wonderful book “The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren” (Oxford University Press, 1959), called “the code of oral legislation” among children. The Opies studied and interviewed children in England, Scotland and Ireland just after World War II, meticulously documenting the customs and vocabulary of their rituals, games, and traditions. What they found was a rich culture that in some cases dated back to the Middle Ages and originated in adult customs at that time. For instance, a child in 20th century England would say “barley” to gain temporary respite from a schoolyard fight, a term that comes from the custom of Medieval knights offering their opponent the opportunity to “parley” or “parlez” (French for “talk”), i.e., ask for mercy. Thus childhood, at the time the Opies studied it, had become a linguistic museum of British history. Today, as we say today, probably not so much.
In the case of “Ollie ollie oxen free” and its many variants, we have a mutated form of the original “all clear” signal. This was probably something like “All’s out come in free” or “All ye out come in free,” meaning that anyone still hiding (“out”) can now come back into the group without fear (“free”) of being tagged “It.” Since the game “Hide and Seek” itself is at least four centuries old, there’s been plenty of time for that original phrase to be filtered through small ears clogged with dirt and come out almost unrecognizable.
The “Ollie” of “Ollie ollie oxen free” is almost certainly the “All ye” reshaped to take the form of “Ollie,” short for the proper name “Oliver.” The “oxen” is classic folk etymology, where a word or words that sound unfamiliar to the listener (“come in,” in this case), especially when slurred, are given the form of a more familiar word (“oxen”). Of course, many British customs have jumped the pond to the US and Canada, and “Ollie ollie oxen free” is well known in America, often with regional variations. In areas of the Midwest settled by immigrants from Norway, for instance, one popular form is “Ole Ole Olsen’s free.”
Sadly, I should probably say “was,” because that form was documented by the Dictionary of American Regional English back in the 1960s. You don’t have to be a geezer to see that the loss of the native culture of childhood to cable TV, videogames and their ilk represents the severing of a irreplaceable link between everyday life today and life centuries ago. The anarchic play of unsupervised kids was, in a real sense, steeped in the culture, from chivalry to superstition, of their great-great-great-and-beyond-grandparents. Kids grew up, but the ancient river of childhood flowed on to greet each new generation. But I’m sure that soon we’ll have an app to replace that. Nom nom.
When I was a kid back in the 1940′s (New York City) we said “Home Free All”. I never heard of “Ollie Ollie Oxen Free” until my kids were playing (Allentown, Pa.) thirty years later.
I heard it originated as “calling all the outs in free” and eventually morphed into “ollie ollie oxen free”
I HEARD IT COME FROM OLDEN TIMES WHEN IT WAS, ALL IN ALL IN URCHINS FREE. URCHINS BEING KIDS
BACK WHEN THE CAP LOCK KEY WAS WELDED DOWN?
I heard it from my old Irish grandmother that it is a slurred version of “All ye, all ye, out and free!”
Gee, my cap lock key was never welded down properly, it keeps CoMiNg UnStUcK. Must have got a bad one here.
I’m 52 and a half years old, and ollie, ollie, oxen free is what I said as a child.
Well, here’s my twist on this saying. This year, I decided to learn German, and I’m currently at level 4 of the German Rosetta Stone course. As you may know, English is a Germanic language, and so many of our words sound very close. I was thinking the other day about the origin of Ollie Ollie oxen free, and I noticed how this could easily have been the poor attempts of English speaking children to imitate their German speaking friends shouting, “Alle alle auch sind frei.”, which means All, All are free.
Btw, punch that German phrase into Google translate and then click the speak icon in the lower right of the translation box, and see if you can hear the similarity. See http://translate.google.com/?hl=en&tab=wT#auto/en/alle%20alle%20auch%20sind%20frei
Of course, another German phrase that’s possible is changing auch to such, as in “Alle alle euch sind frei”, which would render “All, you all are free.” Euch is you and auch is also.
I seem to recall ‘ollie ollie entry,’ while my father told me he used ‘oxen free.’ I’m surprised to see no mention of ‘new cucumber’ here. Typically, a boy would should ‘ollie ollie entry/oxen free, new cucumber!’ This was notice that a new person was joining the game. This was in Boston during the 1960s. It’s been suggested that ‘new cucumber’ was a play on ‘new comer,’ as in new person joining the game.
I have to add that when I was using these words, it never occurred to me that they could be spelled out. Since they were only used orally, there was no reason for them to be tied down to a particular literary form. I think that at the time I would have transliterated ‘ally-ally,’ as in ‘all of you.’ The ‘ollie’ spelling I see now certainly makes less sense than my original assumption.
It is sad to see that this sort of thing seems to be disappearing. Generations of children passed these cultural tidbits down to each other, without schooling or parents being involved. Now? I doubt hide and seek has been played in my old Boston neighborhood in decades.
this 76 yr grandma definitely remembers olly olly ocean free new cucumber…..don’t know why we used “ocean” instead of “oxen”, but we had fun…. I’m also surprised not too much mention of “new cucumber”….
Never heard of cucumber, but we called out “Ally, ally in come free”. I guess it was pretty clean cut in St. Louis in the 70′s.
I grew up in the 1950′s and we would play hide and seek and use the term “ollie, ollie, oxen free”. I grew up on the west coast
Does anybody know of the version, “Ollie, Ollie home come free!”. That’s what I used when I was little in the New York/Connecticut area. I am using it in a show (I am a comedian/singer/songwriter) and I’d like to use 1. a version that people in New York/Connecticut would recognize, and 2. another version that people in Scotland would recognize.
Thanks so much!