Yan Tan Tethera
The shepherd’s count, in a language England stopped speaking fifteen centuries ago.
Origin
Recorded across the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales, Lincolnshire and parts of Wales and the Pennines, and collected in earnest by antiquarians and dialect societies through the nineteenth century.
The catch
The words are not English. Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp are Brythonic numerals, cousins of the Welsh un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump. The language of pre-Roman Britain was driven out of England by Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Norman in turn, and survived in one place: the mouths of men counting sheep on a hillside, because the sheep did not care which language they were counted in.
One to twenty, three ways
Most accounts of this stop at ten, or give a single list without saying whose it is. Here are three, complete, so the divergences are visible. Read down a column for one valley’s count; read across a row to see how far apart they drifted. The Swaledale column is as Jake Thackray recites it, naming the dale, in the spoken introduction to his song about a Swaledale sheep-minder.
| Westmorland | Swaledale | Lincolnshire | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yan | Yan | Yan |
| 2 | Tan | Tyan | Tan |
| 3 | Tethera | Tether | Tethera |
| 4 | Methera | Mether | Pethera |
| 5 | Pimp | Pip | Pimp |
| 6 | Sethera | Ayzar | Sethera |
| 7 | Lethera | Sayzar | Lethera |
| 8 | Hovera | Akkar | Hovera |
| 9 | Dovera | Contar | Covera |
| 10 | Dick | Dick | Dik |
| 11 | Yan-a-dick | Yanadick | Yan-a-dik |
| 12 | Tan-a-dick | Tyanadick | Tan-a-dik |
| 13 | Tethera-dick | Tetheradick | Tethera-dik |
| 14 | Methera-dick | Metheradick | Pethera-dik |
| 15 | Bumfit | Bumfit | Bumfit |
| 16 | Yan-a-bumfit | Yanabum | Yan-a-bumfit |
| 17 | Tan-a-bumfit | Tyanabum | Tan-a-bumfit |
| 18 | Tethera-bumfit | Tetherabum | Tethera-bumfit |
| 19 | Methera-bumfit | Metherabum | Pethera-bumfit |
| 20 | Giggot | Jiggit | Figgit |
One to five and the tens are where the lists agree. Six to nine is where they part company altogether, and twenty is where every valley seems to have gone its own way.
The system is vigesimal, and that is the whole of its practical design. A shepherd counted to twenty, took a stone into his hand to stand for the twenty, or cut a notch in his crook, and began again at yan. Twenty was as many sheep as a man could hold in his head while they moved, and the tally of notches gave him the flock. This is where scoring comes from, in every sense the word still carries. The numbers above ten are compounds of the numbers below, which is why the lists get repetitive at the top and why regional variants diverge most there: yan-a-dick and tan-a-dick for eleven and twelve, then bumfit, then yan-a-bumfit. Dozens of versions were recorded, no two of them quite agreeing, from Borrowdale to Wensleydale to the Lincolnshire marshes. That variation is itself evidence of oral transmission rather than a written standard: nobody was checking these against a book, because there was no book.
On the evidence
The Brythonic derivation is not seriously disputed — the correspondence with Welsh, Cornish and Breton numerals is too close for coincidence. The specific regional word lists are another matter. Almost all were collected by Victorian antiquarians and dialect enthusiasts, some of whom were more enthusiastic than rigorous, and a few variants may be reconstructions, embellishments or simply what one obliging old shepherd said on one afternoon. Spellings in particular vary between sources, since the collectors were writing down sounds they had just heard. Treat the pattern as solid and any individual list as a snapshot.
Still counted
The rhyme survived into living memory well enough to be both explained and sung. Jake Thackray prefaces his song Molly Metcalfe by reciting the Swaledale count in full and describing the method: twenty sheep, then a stone taken into the hand to stand for them, then twenty more. The song that follows uses only the first five words, repeated through the life of a girl sent up onto the moor to mind sheep at eight years old and found dead there twenty years later. The count is the whole refrain. It is the closest thing there is to hearing the system used rather than catalogued.
It is also still being carried. Asked about this online in 2026, two people independently offered versions they had learned as children — azar, sazar, acker, conter for six to nine — which is Thackray’s Swaledale list with the spellings worn down by a few decades of memory. Neither was reading from a book. That is oral transmission still running, a century and a half after the antiquarians thought they were recording something about to vanish.
Jake Thackray, Molly Metcalfe →