The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, by Richard Pillsbury, Charles Reagan Wilson, Ann J. Sources: Children’s sayings / edited with a digression on the small people, William Canton, Isbister & Co, London, 1900 (fully readable online) The game hide-and-seek is at least four centuries old, and it seems that the call phrase discussed here was in common use by the 1920s, and probably earlier (‘home free’ is found in print in the 1890s).
“Allez, allez” was a Norman addition to the English language, pronounced “ollie, ollie” and sometimes written “oyez, oyez” and meaning “everyone.” But one educated guess is that the phrase’s root is an English-Norman French-Dutch/German concoction: “Alles, Alles, in kommen frei” or “Alle, alle auch sind frei” (literally, “Everyone, everyone also is free”)or “Oyez, oyez, in kommen frei!” That’s because they’ve been passed down orally from one generation to the next, with no adult intervention or correction.
Ole Ole Olsen free (more common in areas settled by Scandinavians)Ĭhildren’s sayings were hardly recorded until the 1950s, and they are very variable. “When I was growing up in the American South,” says Charles Wilson in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture,”we actually said, ‘All ye all ye outs in free’ when playing hide-and-seek (although we called it ‘hide-and-go-seek).” Regional variations include: Another approach: in Britain, it was common for the town crier to pre-phrase a declaration with All Ye, All ye meaning that all the citizens of the town needed to be aware of the information the crier was about to state, and early Scots-Irish immigrants to Appalachia would have brought that phrase with them. Check some of my other etymology-related blog posts here.Īlso, if you have any questions, let me know in the comments below.If the core phrase is All outs in free, the -ee is added, and the all is repeated, for audibility and rhythm. Rather than research it and move on, I like to write blog posts to help people with the same curiosity. I often question the origin of words and phrases. Do you agree? Let me know in the comments below.
Could this phrase perhaps have been a German saying that English children started using? To me, this is the most likely explanation. This last one here- alle, alle, auch sind frei-is actually a German phrase that translates to English as “all, all also are free”. Some different variations of olly olly oxen free are: That’s part of the reason there are so many different ways to say and spell the phrase. The phrase was most likely passed orally from one child to another without an adult writing the phrase down. Since olly olly oxen free is a children’s saying, there really isn’t a correct spelling of the phrase. In plain English, this would mean “all who are out can come in free”. So putting it all together, olly olly oxen free translates from childish gibberish to “all of you, all of you, out are free”. Oxen free would then mean something along the lines of “outs are free”. All ye means “all of you”.īut what does “oxen free” mean? Most likely “oxen” is a youngster’s mispronouncing of “outs in” or better yet “out are”. Think along the lines of the popular Christmas carol O Come, All Ye Faithful. Where did the phrase olly olly oxen free come from anyway? Let’s dig into this a little bit deeper and finally figure out what it really means.Īccording to some language experts, “olly” is a variation of the phonetic spelling “all ye”. But intuitively, this phrase makes little sense. Olly olly oxen free is a phrase most commonly used in children’s games, especially when playing hide and seek, to signal that other players are safe to come out of hiding.