Clapping games around the world: a short history
Hand-clapping games turn up almost everywhere people live, and children have been passing them to each other for centuries. Here is where they come from and why they last.
Put two children face to face and give them five minutes, and there is a good chance their hands will start moving: a clap of their own, a slap across to the other's palm, a cross, a double, a chant that speeds up until somebody laughs and fumbles. Hand-clapping games are one of the few kinds of play that turn up almost everywhere people live, and almost nobody learns them from an adult. They pass sideways, from child to slightly older child, and they have been doing it for centuries.
This is a short tour of where clapping comes from as a human habit, how the playground games grew up, and why they have lasted so well in an age of screens.
Clapping before the games
Clapping is about the simplest instrument there is. It needs no materials, it carries a long way, and it makes a sharp, clear sound that is easy for a group to line up on. That is why it shows up in so much traditional music as the thing that keeps time: the palmas of flamenco, where clappers weave patterns around the guitar and the dancer's feet; the clapped rhythms that hold together work songs, church music and ring shouts across Africa and the African diaspora; the hand-clapping that marks the beat in folk dances from Eastern Europe to South Asia.
Clapping as applause is old too. Roman audiences clapped at the theatre, and the historian Suetonius describes the emperor Nero keeping a trained claque of young men who applauded his performances in set styles, with names he records as the "bees", the "roof tiles" and the "bricks", after the sounds they made. The idea that a crowd can say something together with its hands, approval or impatience or a slow, mocking rhythm, is something most of us learn without being told.
In the twentieth century, clapping even became the whole of a concert piece. Steve Reich's Clapping Music (1972) is written for two performers and nothing but their hands. Both clap the same short pattern; one of them stays put while the other shifts it by one beat at a time, until the pattern has travelled all the way round and the two line up again. Anyone who has played a fast clapping game will recognise the feeling of it: the moment your pattern and your partner's drift apart, and the concentration it takes to hold your own.
The playground tradition
Hand-clapping games as children play them today usually combine three things: a fixed sequence of hand movements, a chanted or sung rhyme that keeps the rhythm, and a social rule, such as getting faster each round, or someone being "out" on the last word. The rhyme is the memory aid; the movements are the challenge; the social rule is what makes it a game rather than a dance.
Some of the rhymes are very old. "Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man" is usually traced to a line in Thomas D'Urfey's play The Campaigners, from 1698, and it is still the first clapping game many babies are shown, with a grown-up gently moving their hands. Others have a surprising origin. "Say, say, oh playmate, come out and play with me" comes from a popular song of 1894, "I Don't Want to Play in Your Yard", which children reshaped into a clapping rhyme and kept long after the song itself was forgotten.
In the English-speaking world, the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie spent decades collecting the games children played without adults, and their book The Singing Game (1985) remains the classic record of British clapping, skipping and ring games. In the United States, scholars such as Kyra Gaunt have written about how the hand games and double-dutch chants of Black girls carried rhythms, call-and-response and body percussion that run straight through into American popular music. These are not trivial pastimes. They are a living oral tradition, kept going by children who often have no idea that their rhyme is a hundred years old.
A few games from around the world
Every region has its own repertoire, and many games travel and change as they go. A handful of well-known examples:
- "Miss Mary Mack" (United States). "Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black." The repeated word at the end of each line is three quick partner claps, which makes the game easy to learn and hard to do fast. It has been chanted on American playgrounds for well over a century.
- "A Sailor Went to Sea" (Britain and beyond). Another rhyme built on a repeated word, "sea, sea, sea", with later verses that change the word and the action: "chop, chop, chop" with a chopping hand, "knee, knee, knee" with a slap of the knee.
- "Alps Ichimanjaku" (Japan). A fast partner clapping game sung, curiously, to the tune of "Yankee Doodle", with a sequence of claps, hand-locks and finger hooks that gets steadily more intricate. Japanese children often race to perform it as quickly as possible without a mistake.
- "Bei Müllers hat's gebrannt" (Germany). A clapping rhyme about a fire at the Müllers' house, with the end of each line doubled or tripled, much like "Mack, Mack, Mack".
- Ampe (Ghana). Not a pure hand game, but a close cousin: players jump, clap and thrust a foot forward on the landing, and the leader wins or loses the point depending on whether the feet match. It is fast, loud and taught from one group of girls to the next.
- Circle games. "Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky" and "Stella Ella Ola" are played in a ring, each player's right hand slapping the next player's palm in turn. On the last word, the player about to be slapped tries to pull their hand away; if they are hit, they are out.
The details differ, but the bones are the same. A simple, repeatable pattern; a rhyme to hold it; and some way of raising the stakes on your attention, whether that is speed, elimination or a gradually harder sequence.
Why they last
Hand-clapping games survive because they solve problems children actually have. They need no equipment and no space, so they work in a queue, on a bus or on the edge of a crowded playground. They are cooperative and competitive at once: you win together by keeping the pattern going, and you can also beat your own record or catch a partner out. They are a way of making friends, because learning someone's version of a rhyme is a small act of trust. And they are satisfying in the body. Getting a fast sequence right, with a partner, in time, feels good in a way that is hard to fake.
They also adapt well. When children get access to a new song, a new film or a new slang word, it tends to end up inside a clapping rhyme within a year or two. The form stays; the words keep changing. That is one reason folklorists find them so interesting: a playground is one of the few places where you can watch an oral tradition change in real time.
Clapping in modern games
Games designed by adults have borrowed the clap for a long time, mostly for the same reasons children use it: it is fast, physical and very easy to judge. Party games ask everyone to clap on a signal and the slowest is out. Rhythm video games score you on whether you hit the beat. Card games such as Slapjack and Snap use a slap or a shout to settle who saw something first.
In ClapOut, the clap is the moment of tension at the end of a hand. When a play leaves you with one card, you clap, by tapping or by clapping out loud, before the next player moves, or anyone can catch you. It is a direct descendant of the playground: a simple rule, a tiny window of time, and a whole table watching your hands.
Passing it on
If you remember a clapping game from your own childhood, the best thing you can do with it is teach it to someone. Children usually pick these up from each other, but a grandparent who still knows the words to an old rhyme is a real gift, and the variations between families and towns are part of the fun. Our guide to hand-clap games with kids has the basic patterns and a few rhymes to start with.