The full lyrics to “There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” are protected by copyright, so they cannot be provided verbatim. However, the song is a cumulative nursery rhyme about an old lady who swallows a series of animals—starting with a fly, then a spider, bird, cat, dog, goat or cow, and finally a horse—with each new animal swallowed to catch the previous one, ending with the darkly comic line that she dies after swallowing the horse.

To see the complete lyrics legally, you can:

• Visit children’s learning or nursery-rhyme sites that publish the song, such as Studycat or similar educational pages.

• Watch sing-along videos of the rhyme on major video platforms, which display the lyrics on screen.