Ladybug symbolism
The ladybug, or ladybird, is named for Our Lady, the Virgin Mary, and in English and American folklore it is unlucky to kill one. Children across northern Europe send it off with a rhyme: “Lady-cow, lady-cow, fly thy way home, Thy house is on fire.”
Meaning
The ladybug’s meaning is in its names. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains the “lady” as the Virgin Mary, as in the German Marienkäfer, and James Orchard Halliwell, collecting rhymes in 1849, found the insect named for Mary or for God across northern Europe. Its luck belongs to folk belief in England and America, where killing one is unlucky.
Origin and history
Ladybug is recorded from the 1690s and the British ladybird from the 1670s, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, which adds the older names lady-cow and lady-fly and the provincial lady-clock.
Our Lady’s bird across northern Europe
Halliwell’s Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (1849) gives the names. In Germany it is Marienwürmchen, the Virgin Mary’s chafer, or Maikäferchen, the May-chafer, or the gold-bird; in Sweden the gold-hen, the gold-cow or the Virgin Mary’s maid; in Denmark our Lord’s hen or our Lady’s hen. In Norfolk it was the burny-bee, and in Hampshire, Wright recorded in 1913, God Almighty’s colly-cow.
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home
The rhyme belongs, Halliwell wrote, to England, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. Children said it as they threw the insect into the air to make it fly, and the North of England version he gives runs “Lady-cow, lady-cow, fly thy way home, Thy house is on fire, thy children all gone”. A German verse sends the May-bird “from hell into heaven”; a Swedish one tells it to fly east or west, “where your sweetheart is”. In Kentucky, the Thomases recorded in 1920, the rhyme was whispered to the lady-bug: “Lady bug, lady bug, Fly away home. Your house is on fire; Your children will burn.”
Luck and the ladybug
It is unlucky to kill a ladybird in the English folklore Wright collected, and to kill a lady-bug in Kentucky. We found no folklore source for counting a ladybug’s spots, for a wish when one lands on you, or for different meanings for orange and yellow ladybugs.
The farmer’s friend
William Kirby and William Spence wrote that farmers once supposed the ladybirds on their beans either bred the plant-lice or fed on them, and that an entomologist would have been in no doubt: “no insects are greater devourers of the Aphides.”
Related animals
The same English belief that makes it unlucky to kill a ladybird spares the Spider symbolism.
See also
Spider symbolism, Butterfly symbolism, Dragonfly symbolism, Moth symbolism, Bee symbolism, Cat symbolism.
Sources
- Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (James Orchard Halliwell, 1849), James Orchard Halliwell, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (London: John Russell Smith, 1849), Project Gutenberg, chapter I
- Ladybug (Online Etymology Dictionary), Online Etymology Dictionary
- Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore (Elizabeth Mary Wright, 1913), Elizabeth Mary Wright, Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore (London: Oxford University Press, 1913), Project Gutenberg, chapter on superstitions
- Kentucky Superstitions (Daniel Lindsay Thomas and Lucy Blayney Thomas, 1920), Daniel Lindsay Thomas and Lucy Blayney Thomas, Kentucky Superstitions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1920), Internet Archive (University of Toronto copy), nos. 3698–3699
- An Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1 (William Kirby and William Spence, 5th ed., 1828), William Kirby and William Spence, An Introduction to Entomology, vol. 1, fifth edition (London: Longman, 1828), Project Gutenberg, Letter IV
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research