Why Do People Make a Wish on a Wishbone?
People make wishes on wishbones because of an old British custom in which two people pulled apart the forked bone of a bird and used the result to decide who would receive good luck, marry first or have a wish granted.
Most of us meet the wishbone at the end of a roast dinner, when someone digs it out and asks who wants the other side. Two people take an end, make private wishes and pull, each quietly hoping the bone has chosen them while insisting they didn’t twist their wrist.
The person holding the larger piece is usually declared the winner, although folklore has never been entirely consistent about that. Older versions include marriage predictions, extra rounds and rules about remaining silent. One seventeenth-century account even begins by balancing the bone on your nose.
The modern game is often traced all the way back to ancient Etruscan fortune-telling, but the evidence becomes much firmer once we reach England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The custom is certainly old. It just doesn’t arrive with the tidy ancient history usually printed beside it.
What Is Supposed to Happen When You Break a Wishbone?
In the familiar version, two people each hold one arm of a dried wishbone and make a secret wish. They pull until the bone snaps, and whoever gets the larger piece will supposedly have their wish come true.
Some families say the winner receives general good luck instead. Others insist both people must keep their wishes secret or that the bone has to break naturally rather than being deliberately bent at the centre. There are also traditions in which the smaller piece wins, proving that even a two-pronged bone can generate a disagreement over the rules.
The silence surrounding the wish is important in many versions. Saying it aloud was thought to weaken or spoil it, much as revealing a birthday wish before blowing out the candles supposedly prevents it from coming true.
What Is a Wishbone?
In short, the wishbone is the V-shaped bone found near the front of a bird’s chest. Chickens, turkeys and geese all have one, although turkey wishbones are easier for two people to hold and pull apart.
Why Does the Wishbone Have to Dry First?
A fresh wishbone still contains moisture and has some flexibility, so it’s more likely to bend than produce the satisfying snap the game requires. Cleaning it and leaving it to dry makes it more brittle.
Families often leave the bone on a windowsill or kitchen shelf for several days. There’s no agreed magical waiting period. It just needs enough time to stop behaving like part of a working bird and start behaving like a small, badly designed Christmas cracker.
If you try to pull it immediately after the meal, you may end up stretching it, dropping it or sending one end across the room. None of these outcomes traditionally grants an additional wish.
How Old Is the Wishbone Custom?
The older English name for the wishbone was the merrythought. We know that name was being used by 1598 because John Florio included it in his Italian–English dictionary, A Worlde of Wordes, defining an Italian term as “the bone called the merie thought”.
That entry proves the name was familiar, but it doesn’t describe the pulling game. A much fuller account appears in the folklore notes of English antiquary John Aubrey, written in 1686 and 1687.
In Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, Aubrey says it was common for two people to break the merrythought of a chicken, hen or woodcock. His version involved balancing the bone across the nose like a pair of spectacles, shaking it off while thinking of a wish and then pulling it apart. The longer piece won the wish, although the participants could follow this with another drawing of the two fragments.
The extra ceremony hasn’t survived in most households. People apparently decided that waiting for the bone to dry was enough administration for one wish.
Why Was It Called a Merrythought?
The name has attracted more than one explanation. It has often been connected with the pleasant or “merry” thoughts people formed while pulling the bone. Because many versions predicted which participant would marry first, it could also suggest thoughts about romance and marriage.
Aubrey offered a bawdier explanation based on what he thought the bone resembled when a bird was opened for carving. It’s the sort of historical detail that rarely appears on the packaging of a supermarket turkey.
Whatever produced the older name, wishbone eventually replaced it. Merriam-Webster connects the word directly with the belief that the person receiving the longer fragment will have a wish granted and dates its first known use to the mid-nineteenth century.
The custom was therefore established long before the name most people use today. The bone didn’t suddenly become magical in the 1800s; its newer name merely made the rules easier to guess.
Did the Wishbone Tradition Come From the Etruscans?
The most frequently repeated origin story begins with the Etruscans, who lived in ancient Italy before Rome became the dominant power there. According to the story, they regarded chickens as oracles, preserved their furculae and stroked the dried bones while making wishes.
The Romans supposedly adopted the practice and began breaking the bones because there weren’t enough of them for everybody who wanted a wish. Roman soldiers then carried the custom across Europe, and the English eventually turned it into the merrythought game.
Some of the background is genuine. Birds played an important part in ancient divination, and Romans really did consult the behaviour of sacred chickens. Cicero discussed Roman officials watching whether chickens ate food and allowed pieces to fall from their beaks before making important decisions.
What’s missing is dependable evidence for the rest of the chain. Ancient bird divination doesn’t by itself prove that Etruscans stroked furculae, made wishes on them or passed a bone-breaking custom to Rome. The claim that Romans snapped the bones because demand exceeded supply sounds especially like a later attempt to explain why one perfectly good bone ended up in two pieces.
The Etruscan theory remains possible as distant background, but it shouldn’t be presented as the proven origin of the modern game. The documented trail is much clearer in early modern England, where the merrythought is named in 1598 and its breaking ritual is described later in the seventeenth century.
Did the Pilgrims Start the Thanksgiving Wishbone Tradition?
No surviving account shows people breaking a turkey wishbone at the 1621 harvest gathering commonly called the first Thanksgiving. The claim is usually attached to the broader story that English settlers brought their merrythought custom to North America, where plentiful turkeys provided larger bones.
That movement of an English custom is plausible, but it isn’t the same as proving what happened at one particular meal. The wishbone became firmly associated with American Thanksgiving later, when roast turkey became the holiday’s central dish and the bone offered an easy after-dinner ritual.
The word wishbone was appearing in American writing by the 1840s, including descriptions of Thanksgiving celebrations. By then, the older merrythought had acquired a name that explained its purpose without requiring a family historian at the table.
Was the Wishbone Used to Predict the Weather?
Bird bones have also been used for weather prediction, although this is where anatomy can become muddled. A medieval European custom involved keeping the breastbone of a goose eaten around Martinmas and reading its colour or markings to predict the coming winter.
The bone in these accounts is frequently called a wishbone in modern retellings. Historical descriptions, however, refer to the goose’s breastbone, which can mean the sternum rather than the furcula. The weather custom and the two-person wishing game both involve a bone from a cooked bird, but that doesn’t make them identical.
It’s possible that different writers and communities used the terms loosely. What we shouldn’t do is quietly move a weather-reading tradition from one bone to another because the wishbone has the better publicist.
Were Wishbones Always Used for Wishes?
No. Marriage was one of their most persistent subjects. In some versions, the person with the longer piece would marry first. Other customs used the broken bone to predict the identity or arrival of a future spouse.
A Canadian belief published in the journal Folklore in 1913 said the larger fragment should be hung above the front door. The first young unmarried person to walk beneath it would marry within a year. This gave the bone a second career after the pulling contest and must have made entering the house unexpectedly eventful.
An English collection recorded another method in which the bone was dried on an oven, pulled with the little fingers and awarded to the person receiving the longest piece. That person made a secret wish and had to avoid speaking before doing so.
These variations show that there was never one international rulebook. The bone could settle a wish, predict a marriage, choose a winner or become a small household charm. People kept the part they liked and adjusted the rest to suit the evening.
Can You Improve Your Chances of Winning?
The winning fragment is determined by the bone’s shape, thickness, dryness and the way each person pulls. The two arms aren’t perfectly identical, and a small weakness or crack can decide where the break travels.
Holding closer to the centre can give you more control, while pulling straight and steadily may place less damaging sideways force on your own side. Twisting can change the break too, although your opponent may regard this as cheating rather than evidence of advanced poultry mechanics.
None of these methods guarantees the larger piece. Once the bone starts breaking, the crack follows the weakest route through it. The result feels random because most people haven’t inspected the furcula for structural weaknesses before making their wish.
Is Breaking a Wishbone an Omen, a Charm or a Game?
It contains elements of all three. The pulling itself is a game and a small act of divination, using an uncertain result to choose between two people. Receiving the larger piece can then be interpreted as a good omen for the wish you made.
If the winning fragment is kept or worn as jewellery, it becomes a lucky charm. Wishbone pendants and earrings preserve the shape without requiring their owners to clean a turkey first.
The custom is also a superstition because it connects an ordinary physical event with a future outcome that the bone can’t actually control. The crack decides who gets which piece, not whose hope is more deserving.
Do Wishbone Wishes Really Come True?
There’s no evidence that receiving the larger fragment makes a wish more likely to come true. A wishbone breaks according to its physical structure and the forces applied to it, not according to the plans of whoever cooked the bird.
That doesn’t make the ritual pointless. Making a private wish gives you a moment to decide what you’re hoping for, while pulling the bone turns that hope into a shared memory. Years later, people are often more likely to remember who stood on the other side than what they actually wished for.
The custom survives because it needs almost nothing: one leftover bone, two willing participants and enough optimism to believe dinner might still have a surprise hidden in it.
One Bone, Two Wishes and No Appeals
The wishbone didn’t begin with one securely documented ancient invention. Its history is a mixture of a real bird bone, an old English merrythought game, marriage divination and later stories that tried to carry the custom back to Etruscan oracles.
What we can say with confidence is that English speakers had a name for the bone by the end of the sixteenth century and were recording detailed rules for breaking it in the seventeenth. Over time, the marriage predictions became less important, the private wish took over and the merrythought acquired a much more obvious name.
The larger piece can’t force the future to cooperate, but it can still give you a brief sense that luck has taken your side.
Find more everyday rituals and their possible origins in our collection of superstitions and omens.