OLLY, OLLY OXEN FREE - "If you've ever wondered about the origins of this chant - used to call in all players at the end of a game of hide-and-seek - be advised that the experts only have a partial answer to your lifelong puzzlement. : You can check the archives to find many references to this phrase.įor more discussion, search the archives under "oxen." My husband says the full verse is, "Olly, olly oxen free if you don't come now, you'll be I-T!" : : My guess? All ye, all ye, come in free, which became mangled while passing from one kid to another: olly, olly oxen free. No, that's what you say every time, Nick explained. Shawn Fucile, 8, figured 10 year-old Zach Hedrick made it up. : : "After the Olly, Olly cry went up in Orem the other night, I asked a few kids where it came from. One game player guessed it had something to do with oxen, while another was sure it had Olde English roots. But where did this nonsensical phrase come from? : : "It is used by kids everywhere to signal it is safe to emerge during Hide-and-Seek games. : : I liked this explanation by Brooke Adams, in the Salt Lake City Tribune on 19 July 2004 Idiomation was unable to located the phrase used in the game of hide-and-seek that was used to call hiders back to “home base” in either Froissart’s era or Pollux’s era.In Reply to: Olly, Olly Oxen Free posted by Bob on November 03, 2005 We also know that the game of hide-and-seek is nearly identical to the game described by the 2nd-century Greek writer Julius Pollux. What we do know is that French court historian and poet, Jean Froissart (1337 – 1405) wrote of having played hide-and-go-seek in England as well as in France. It may also be a corruption of “ allez, allez” which is a Norman addition to the English language from French and is pronounced “ all-ay, all-ay.” The word “ allez” in French, of course, means “ go.” The ensuing “ in kommen frei” was a phrase popular in Dutch/German New York and Pennsylvania and meant “ come in free.” In this case, “ Allez, allez, in kommon frie” may have morphed into a French-English hybrid: “ Allez, allez, come in free!” With minimal effort, it easily becomes: ollie, ollie, oxen free. Imagine how it sounds when excited children are running about, shouting this at the top of their lungs and it’s easy to see how it becomes this: aw-luh aw-luh owxin fry. ![]() When “ a lle, alle auch sind frei” is said in a normal speaking voice, phonetically it sounds somewhat like this: aw-luh aw-luh owhk zint fry. The most likely explanation for the phrase is that it is a corruption of the German “ Alle, alle auch sind frei” which, when translated, means “ Everyone, everyone also is free.” ![]() And so, errors in passing the sayings down from generation to generation is not unlike the misheard lyrics of popular songs over the decades. That’s because they’ve been passed down orally from one generation to the next, with no adult intervention or correction. In Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, if a player shoots an enemy and then hides, the player is hunted down with the phrase “ Ollie, ollie, oxen free! Come out, come out wherever you are!”Īside from that, it’s hard to find published references to the phrase “ ollie, ollie, oxen free.”Ĭhildren’s sayings were hardly recorded until the 1950s, and even then, the sayings are very variable. In the video games, Halo: The Fall of Reach and Halo: First Strike, the phrase “ ollie, ollie, oxen free” is used a number of times to pass along information to other members of the team.
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