Tom, Dick and Harry

As in ‘every Tom, Dick and Harry was there’, which, despite the names, means that an unspecified number of unknown people were there. Putting together strings of names in this way is common to many other languages besides English. Shakespeare in Henry IV Part I Act II, Scene IV used, “Tom, Dick and Francis”. According to the OED, the first citation for Tom, Dick and Harry is from 1734 where it appears as a popular song lyric, but other sources maintain it first appeared about one hundred years before this. Thomas Hardy in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874) used, “Dick, Tom and Harry” whether deliberately or mistakenly is not known.