Who Are Tom, Dick, and Harry?

Sometimes we can’t trace the exact origin of an idiom that’s been popularized over centuries, but the history of “Tom, Dick, and Harry” is easier to follow. The original threesome, however, included a Mary, not a Harry. It appeared in a 1592 pamphlet, “Four Letters Confuted,” by Thomas Nashe, a British pamphleteer and author. He wrote, “Men myth [sic] think themselves in Paul’s churchyard without Tom, Dick and Mary.”

Shakespeare adopted similar phrasing a few years later, but he replaced Mary with Francis in Henry IV, Part 1. In Act 2, Scene 4, Prince Hal’s loyal confidante, Ned Poins, asks Hal where he’s been, to which Hal replies: 

“I have sounded the very bass string of humility. Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers and can call them all by their christen names, as Tom, Dick and Francis.”

There are some examples using Harry before Shakespeare’s play, but he may have inserted Francis because Harry was a nickname for Henry IV.

Mary and Francis were quickly pushed aside, though, and in 1657, Oxford Vice-Chancellor John Owen wrote to the governing body at Oxford University, “Our critical situation and our common interests were discussed out of journals and newspapers by every Tom, Dick, and Harry.” 

The connection between these names and the everyman was established here: Owen’s polished prose was understood to be a disparaging reference to the common, unacademic men discussing affairs of state, even though (in his view) they were too unsophisticated to know what they were talking about.

Using those three names in connection with the common man was further solidified in the 17th century, because the formal versions of Tom, Dick, and Harry — Thomas, Richard, and Henry — were three of the top 10 names for men. Today, the top names for newborn boys are Noah, Liam, and Oliver, so if the idiom were created today, it could be “every Noah, Liam, and Ollie.”