Limerick
Quick answer: A limerick is a five-line comic poem rhyming aabba with a bouncing anapaestic rhythm. Learn the limerick's rules, history, and how to write one that lands.
A limerick is a five-line comic poem rhyming aabba, with three stressed beats in lines one, two, and five, and two beats in the shorter lines three and four, all driven by a bouncing, anapaestic rhythm. It is the one verse form almost everyone in the English-speaking world can identify by ear, and the only one whose entire job description is to be funny.
The name's link to the Irish city of Limerick is genuinely obscure, possibly via a parlour-song refrain, and the form was circulating before it had the name. What fixed it in the culture was Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense (1846), which delighted Victorian readers, even though Lear's habit of repeating his first-line rhyme word at the end would get him workshop notes today. The modern limerick demands a fresh rhyme and a punchline.
How It Works
The skeleton: line one introduces a person and usually a place ('There was an old man of...' is the classic ignition), line two establishes the predicament, the short lines three and four accelerate the complication, and line five delivers the twist. The meter is anapaestic, da-da-DUM, which gives the form its gallop; fight the gallop and the joke dies.
An original example: 'A poet from Dover named Klee / wrote verse only gulls could see. / When critics complained, / he simply explained: / my readership starts at the quay.' Set-up, complication, pivot, pun: the five-line machine in motion.
Where You Will See It
Lear owns the nineteenth century, and the twentieth belongs to the anonymous legions: pub limericks, competition limericks, and the vast unprintable folk corpus that thrives precisely because the form feels like mischief. Magazines and radio shows have run limerick competitions for a century, and comic poets like Ogden Nash worked the same comic-rhyme territory. Scientists and mathematicians adore the form; there is a well-worn tradition of limericks about relativity and number theory, proof that the shape can carry surprisingly technical freight.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Write the last line first. A limerick is a joke, and jokes are engineered backwards from the punchline; choose a killer final rhyme, then build lines one and two to set it up innocently. Place the funniest word at the very end of line five, on the beat.
Respect the meter more, not less, as the content gets sillier. Wrenched stresses and padded syllables are the two failure modes of amateur limericks. Read aloud, count the gallop, and cut every word the rhythm does not need. A technically clean limerick is rarer than poets think, and it is a genuine test of ear.
What poets can take from this
- Engineer backwards: write the punchline rhyme first.
- Keep the anapaestic gallop strict; rhythm is half the joke.
- Put the funniest word last, landing on the final beat.
- Avoid Lear's repeat of the line-one rhyme; twist instead.
- Test aloud on a listener; if they do not smile, rebuild line five.
Try it yourself
Write three limericks about your own writing life: one on rejection, one on rhyme, one on reading in public. Make each punchline a word that has never appeared in a limerick before, as far as you can tell.
Questions
What is the exact rhyme scheme and meter of a limerick?
Five lines rhyming aabba. Lines one, two, and five carry three stressed beats; lines three and four carry two. The underlying rhythm is anapaestic, two light syllables then a stress, giving the characteristic bounce.
Why is it called a limerick?
Nobody knows for certain. The likeliest theory ties it to a nineteenth-century party song with a refrain about coming up to Limerick, but the documentary trail is thin. The form predates the name.
Can a limerick be serious?
It almost never works. The form's rhythm signals comedy so strongly that solemn content reads as parody. If you want a serious short comic-adjacent form, try a clerihew's gentler irony or light verse generally.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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