What is a limerick?

A limerick is a five-line comic poem with a bouncing rhythm and a fixed rhyme scheme, AABBA. Lines one, two and five are longer and rhyme with each other; lines three and four are shorter and rhyme with each other; and the last line delivers the punchline. It is the only fixed poetic form most people can recite from memory, usually without meaning to.

A limerick, labelled

The letters down the right-hand side show the rhyme scheme. The two short lines in the middle are set in, as limericks traditionally are, so you can see the shape before you read a word.

The rules

• Five lines. Always. Four-line and six-line “limericks” are something else.
• Rhyme scheme AABBA. Two rhyme sounds, and the first one returns for the punchline.
• Three beats on the long lines, two on the short ones. The rhythm is a gallop of two light syllables and one strong one, da-da-DUM, a foot called the anapest. The number of light syllables can vary a little, as long as the strong beats stay evenly spaced.
• A punchline on the last line. Not a rule anyone wrote down, but a limerick without one feels broken.

Traditionally the first line introduces a person and a place, often with the place at the end of the line to set up the rhyme: There was a young lady from…. Modern limericks are free to start anywhere. For a step-by-step method, see how to write a limerick.

Where the name comes from

The honest answer is that nobody is sure. The name is generally taken to refer to the city or county of Limerick in Ireland. The most popular theory links it to a nonsense-verse parlour game, in which each improvised verse was followed by a sung refrain along the lines of “Will you come up to Limerick?”

The word itself arrived late. Dictionaries long dated the first use of limerick for this kind of poem to 1898 in England, but researchers have since found an 1880 newspaper in Saint John, New Brunswick, printing a verse in the form and naming its tune as “Won’t you come to Limerick.” By the early twentieth century the name had stuck.

A short history

Edward Lear’s limericks

Lear’s limericks are nonsense rather than jokes. Each came with one of his own drawings, and the last line usually repeated the end of the first, so the poem finishes where it started. The humour is in the absurdity, not a punchline. This one is from A Book of Nonsense (1846), in the public domain:

Modern limericks changed one thing: they end on a new rhyme word, which gives the last line a twist. There are more of Lear’s, alongside original modern ones, on the limerick examples page.

The rude tradition

Alongside Lear’s nursery nonsense, the limerick has always had a second life as an adult form, traded in pubs, common rooms and barracks. The folklorist Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest scholarly collection of limericks, went so far as to argue that the true folk limerick is always obscene, and that breaking taboos is part of what the form is for.

That is why so many people know limericks that could not be printed in a school textbook, and why the limerick generator on this site has a heat setting that runs from clean to adults only.

Limericks and their cousins

• Clerihew: four lines, AABB, always about a named person, with rhythm deliberately uneven. Invented by E. C. Bentley.
• Double dactyl: two short stanzas in a strict DUM-da-da rhythm, beginning with a nonsense phrase and a name.
• Acrostic: any poem whose first letters spell a word. It can be a limerick as well, if the word has five letters. The acrostic generator on this site writes the other kind.

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