"Ring a Ring o' Roses" or "Ring Around the Rosie" is a nursery rhyme or folksong and playground singing game. It first appeared in print in 1881; but it is reported that a version was already being sung to the current tune in the 1790s. It has a Roud Folk Song Index number of 7925. Urban legend says the song originally described the plague, but folklorists reject this idea.

The first printing of the rhyme was in Kate Greenaway’s 1881 edition of Mother Goose or the Old Nursery Rhymes:

Ring-a-ring-a-roses,
A pocket full of posies;
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down.

The rhyme must already have been widely distributed. A novel of 1855, The Old Homestead by Ann S. Stephens, describes children playing "Ring, ring a rosy" in New York.William Wells Newell reports two versions in America a short time later (1883) and says that another was known in New Bedford, Massachusetts around 1790:

Ring a ring a Rosie,
A bottle full of posie,
All the girls in our town
Ring for little Josie.

There are also versions in Shropshire, collected in 1883, and a manuscript of rhymes collected in Lancashire at the same period gives three closely related versions, with the now familiar sneezing, for instance: