Everybody joins hands, circles round, and tumbles down together at the end. It's one of the best-known singing games in the language, built entirely for group play.
Sung as a circle game: hold hands, walk round, all fall down at the end.
From Mother Goose / Nursery Rhymes (traditional). See the whole collection.
Ring a ring o' roses,
A pocketful of posies.
Tisha! Tisha!
We all fall down.
How it's usually said today
Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
Traditional rhymes have no single fixed text. The main version on this page is as printed in our source edition; this one is the wording most people say today.
About this rhyme
Roud Folk Song Index 7925 · The plague origin is a twentieth-century myth
You may have heard that this rhyme is about the Great Plague: rosy rash, posies of herbs, sneezing, then everybody dead. It is a good story and it is not true. Folklorists have looked and found no plague link at all, and the explanation was invented in the twentieth century, long after the words themselves. The rhyme first appeared in print in the nineteenth century, and older versions carry quite different lines.
For many children this is the first game with a rule they can actually follow, so it tends to land somewhere around age two. The fall is the whole point. Do it on grass, a bed, or a soft carpet so nobody minds going down hard, and expect to be asked for it again straight away.
Public domain. Text from The Real Mother Goose (Blanche Fisher Wright, 1916), via Project Gutenberg. View the source edition