Lyrics
The wheels on the bus go round and round, Round and round, round and round. The wheels on the bus go round and round, All through the town.
#The Wheels on the Bus at a glance
- Country of origin
- 🇺🇸 United States
- Sung in
- English
- Words by
- Verna Hills
- First known
- 1937 (as “The Bus”)
- Best for ages
- 2–7
- Mood
- dancing, playful
- Last updated
- 25 July 2026
How to sing it
- Roll your hands around each other for the wheels going "round and round".
- Swish your arms like wipers, press an imaginary horn, bounce for the bumps — a new action every verse.
- Make up new verses for anything on the bus: the doors, the babies, the driver.
Meaning and origin
This is a song you do more than sing. Every verse hands the children a new action — hands rolling for the wheels, arms swishing for the wipers, a palm thumping an imaginary horn — so a whole room can be kept busy simply by naming one more part of the bus. It is an action song built to be extended: the doors, the babies, the driver, the money, all the way through the town.
For all that it feels timeless, it has an author and a date. Verna Hills, a writer in Boston, published it in the December 1937 issue of American Childhood under the plain title “The Bus”. She built it on the frame of an older English game song, “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush”, which is why it falls so naturally into verse-after-verse with actions.
The words have drifted a little — Hills’s “bouncing off their seats” has mostly given way to “all through the town” — but the design is unchanged, and it has carried the song a very long way. A modern video of it is among the most-watched things on the internet, which is a strange fate for a small teacher’s rhyme about a bus.
Common questions
- Who wrote "The Wheels on the Bus"?
- The American writer Verna Hills (1898–1990), of Boston. It was published in the December 1937 issue of the magazine "American Childhood", where it was simply called "The Bus".
- What kind of song is "The Wheels on the Bus"?
- An action song: each verse names a part of the bus — the wheels, the wipers, the horn, the people — and everyone acts out its movement or makes its sound. It is modelled on the older English game song "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush".
- Have the words changed?
- A little. The 1937 original had lines like "over the city streets" and "bouncing off their seats"; most versions today end each verse with "all through the town" instead.
