Origins
The name Jack Sprat was used of people of small stature in the sixteenth century. This rhyme was an English proverb from at least the mid-seventeenth century. It appeared in John Clarke's collection of sayings in 1639 in the form:
- Jack will eat not fat, and Jull doth love no leane.
- Yet betwixt them both they lick the dishes cleane.
The saying entered the canon of English nursery rhymes when it was printed in Mother Goose's Melody around 1765, but it may have been adopted for use with children much earlier.
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