48 Fun Facts About Limericks

In a much-quoted Edward Lear limerick, two owls, a hen, four larks and a wren have all built their nests where?

An Old Man's beard: 'It is just as I feared!' is all he says about it, a calm that the Spectator's reviewer admired as the verse's 'kindly fatalism'.

What is the rhyme scheme of a limerick?

AABBA: the first, second and last lines share one rhyme and the other two a second, a pattern so fixed that parodists can get a laugh simply by refusing to rhyme at all.

What is the da-da-DUM foot of limericks, two unstressed syllables then a stressed one, called?

Anapaest comes from the Greek for 'struck back', because it turns the dactyl's DUM-da-da back to front; strung together, the feet give the limerick its gallop.

What does the first line of a limerick traditionally introduce?

A person and a place: the place usually ends the line and sets the rhyme the second and last lines must match, which is why limerick writers go hunting for far-flung towns.

In early limericks, the last line was typically what?

A near-repeat of the opening was Edward Lear's habit: his last lines circle back to end on the first line's final word, so the joke lies in the absurdity, not in a punchline.

Which festive favourite gallops along in the same da-da-DUM rhythm as a limerick?

'Twas the Night Before Christmas, first printed anonymously in 1823 as 'A Visit from St. Nicholas', runs on the same two light beats and a heavy one, a bounce poets have mostly kept for comic verse.

A 1923 Punch limerick about a 'young lady named Bright', who 'returned on the previous night', pokes fun at whose theory?

Einstein's relativity is the target: she travels 'far faster than light', sets out 'in a relative way' and is home before she left. Its author, Reginald Buller, was a professor of botany.

An online project launched in 2004 aims to write a limerick for every entry in which kind of book?

A dictionary: the OEDILF is working through English alphabetically, one rhymed definition at a time, and had to drop 'Oxford' from its name after the real OED's lawyers advised against it.

Gershon Legman, who collected bawdy limericks by the thousand, also claimed to have coined which 1960s slogan?

Make love, not war: Legman said he first used it in a 1963 university lecture, though several others made the same claim and the earliest printed uses date from Berkeley protests in 1965.

The limerick anthologist Gershon Legman was also a founder of which craft's modern international movement?

Origami owes much of its Western following to him: he sought out the Japanese master Akira Yoshizawa and staged his first overseas exhibition, in Amsterdam in 1955.

Edward Lear popularised the limerick with which 1846 collection?

A Book of Nonsense grew out of rhymes Lear made up to amuse a patron's young relatives, and its opening verse credits the whole thing to an 'Old Derry down Derry, who loved to see little folks merry'.

In Edward Lear's limericks, the eccentric hero is forever being questioned, scolded or even smashed by whom?

'They' are never named: they ask the questions, pass the verdicts and, when an old man of Whitehaven dances a quadrille with a raven, call it absurd and smash him.

Edward Lear was born in 1812 on the northern edge of which city?

London kept him only for his youth: he spent most of his adult life abroad, sketching his way through Italy, Greece, Albania, Egypt and India, and settled for good on the Italian coast.

Edward Lear, one of 21 children, was raised from early childhood mainly by whom?

An older sister, Ann, took him in when the family's money ran short; she was 21 years his senior and went on mothering him until her death, by which time he was nearly 50.

Which lifelong condition did Edward Lear keep hidden, leaving the room whenever he sensed an attack coming?

Epilepsy struck him from the age of six, and he felt such shame about it that he learned to read the warning signs and withdraw before anyone could witness a seizure.

Edward Lear's first published work, begun in his teens, was a set of illustrations of which birds?

Parrots, drawn from the living birds instead of from stuffed skins as was then usual, made his name as a teenager, and a rare blue macaw now carries his name.

From 1832 to 1836 Lear was employed drawing the private menagerie of which aristocrat at Knowsley Hall?

The Earl of Derby found him sketching at the zoo and said, 'You must come and draw my birds at Knowsley'; a later rumour held that the Earl had written the nonsense himself, 'Lear' being an anagram of 'Earl'.

Which invented adjective from 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' is now in many dictionaries?

Runcible first described the spoon the newlyweds eat with, but Lear went on to give the same word to a hat, a goose and a wall, so nobody can say what he meant by it.

Although Lear was English, 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' first appeared in 1870 in a magazine from which country?

United States: the children's magazine Our Young Folks printed the poem a year before Lear put it in a book of his own, so American readers met the seagoing pair first.

In his comic verse self-portrait, Edward Lear writes that 'Old Foss is the name of his' what?

Cat: Foss was a stumpy-tailed tabby who kept Lear company in old age, and by many accounts Lear had his new villa built to the old one's floor plan so the animal would not be confused.

In Edward Lear's poem, the Jumblies famously went to sea in what?

A sieve: everyone warns them they will drown, yet the Jumblies sail for twenty years, come home taller, and are feasted by the very friends who told them not to go.

Edward Lear published twelve musical settings of poems by which poet laureate, who addressed the poem 'To E.L.' to him?

Tennyson returned the compliment in 'To E.L., on His Travels in Greece', praising 'such a pencil, such a pen', and lines from that poem are carved on Lear's headstone.

The limerick that begins 'A wonderful bird is the pelican' is often wrongly credited to which American humorist?

Ogden Nash usually gets the credit, but the verse was written in 1910 by Dixon Lanier Merritt, a Nashville newspaper editor, after a reader sent him a postcard from the Florida coast.

In the well-known limerick, a pelican's bill 'will hold more than his' what?

Belican, which is 'belly can' squeezed to fit the rhyme: the verse goes on to marvel that the bird's beak takes food enough for a week, and signs off with a second mangled rhyme.

The most notorious limerick opening is 'There once was a man from' which Massachusetts island?

Nantucket rhymes with so many rude phrases that the opening line alone now works as a joke; a perfectly clean version ran in the Princeton Tiger humour magazine as early as 1902.

Which science-fiction author published Lecherous Limericks in 1975?

Isaac Asimov said it all began with a verse he made up aboard the liner Queen Elizabeth 2 on his way home from Britain in 1974; sequels followed, among them Still More Lecherous Limericks.

In Edward Lear's poem, the Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a boat of which colour?

Pea-green: they packed honey and 'plenty of money, wrapped up in a five-pound note', sailed for a year and a day, and married with a ring bought from a pig for a shilling.

Leigh Mercer's famous limerick, which begins 'A dozen, a gross, and a score', is really what in disguise?

An equation: add three times the square root of four, divide by seven, add five times eleven, and the verse's last line is true, since the total is nine squared 'and not a bit more'.

In the title of an Edward Lear poem, which part of 'the Dong' is luminous?

His nose is home-made: the Dong weaves it from bark, hangs a lamp inside and roams the night with it, searching for the Jumbly girl who sailed away and left him.

Which four-line comic verse about a famous person is named after the middle name of its inventor, Edmund Bentley?

Clerihew: Bentley was a sixteen-year-old pupil at St Paul's School when the first one, about the chemist Humphry Davy, came into his head in the middle of a science class.

The double dactyl, a comic verse form invented in 1951, traditionally opens with which nonsense phrase?

Higgledy piggledy sets the galloping beat; the form's inventors, Anthony Hecht and Paul Pascal, then demanded a real person's name in the next line and, later on, one line made of a single six-syllable word.

Which Lewis Carroll poem begins with the words ''Twas brillig'?

Jabberwocky appears in Through the Looking-Glass printed back to front, so Alice has to hold the book up to a mirror to read it, and even then she cannot quite say what it means.

Limerick, the Irish city that shares its name with the verse, straddles which river?

The Shannon, the longest river in Ireland, was dammed just upstream of the city in the 1920s, and for its first years that one power station could supply the whole country's electricity.

The Irish city of Limerick was founded more than a thousand years ago by which settlers?

Vikings raided up the river for decades before one of their sea-kings built a permanent stronghold on an island in midstream in 922, the core of the city that grew up around it.

Which drink is said to have been invented in the 1940s for chilled flying-boat passengers at Foynes in County Limerick?

Irish coffee is credited to the terminal's chef, Joe Sheridan, who laced the coffee with whiskey for passengers whose flight had turned back in bad weather; a travel writer later carried the idea to San Francisco.

The 1691 Treaty of Limerick let a defeated Irish army sail for France, an exodus remembered as the Flight of the what?

Wild Geese: Patrick Sarsfield's Jacobite soldiers were allowed to leave with their arms and flags, and thousands chose exile and service under James II in France over life under the victors.

Which Limerick-born actor played Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films?

Richard Harris turned the part down three times and gave in only when his eleven-year-old granddaughter threatened never to speak to him again; he died in 2002 and Michael Gambon took over.

The 13th-century castle on King's Island in Limerick is named after which English king?

John ordered it built; he had been Lord of Ireland since before he wore the English crown, which is how the king of Magna Carta comes to have his name on an Irish castle.

At Thomond Park in Limerick in 1978, Munster famously beat which touring side 12-0?

The All Blacks were shut out in front of 12,000 people, though many times that number claim to have been there, and no Irish side managed to beat them again until 2016.

Limerick's county team won five All-Ireland senior titles between 2018 and 2023 in which sport?

Hurling is the county's game today, but its footballers got there first: a Limerick club side won the very first All-Ireland football championship, the one for 1887.

Which Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of a poverty-stricken childhood is set mainly in Limerick?

Angela's Ashes begins in Brooklyn, where Frank McCourt was born; the family sailed back to his mother's home city in the Depression hoping for better, and sank deeper into poverty instead.

Which of these bands was formed in Limerick in 1989?

The Cranberries started out as The Cranberry Saw Us and shortened the name once Dolores O'Riordan joined as singer; the hits 'Linger' and 'Dreams' followed on their first album.

Limerick-born composer Bill Whelan wrote the music for which Irish dance show, first seen as a 1994 Eurovision interval act?

Riverdance began as seven minutes of music and stepdance to fill the interval of the song contest in Dublin; the response was so strong that it was built up into a full-length stage show.

According to the title of an Edward Lear poem, the Pobble has no what?

Toes: the Pobble loses them swimming the Bristol Channel, in spite of the strip of scarlet flannel he wears as a precaution, and his aunt decides that Pobbles are happier without them.

The usual, though unproven, theory traces the name 'limerick' to a chorus sung during what?

A party game: each guest improvised a nonsense verse and everyone then sang 'Will you come up to Limerick?', or so the lexicographer James Murray reported in 1898, with no earlier evidence to back it.

In an Edward Lear limerick, an Old Man in a tree is 'horribly bored' by which creature?

A bee: when the onlookers ask whether it buzzes, the old man answers that it does, and adds that it is 'a regular brute of a Bee'.

In the limerick attributed to W. S. Gilbert that refuses to rhyme, the old man of St Bees is stung by what?

A wasp, which is the whole joke: 'St. Bees' cries out for its rhyme and never gets one, 'hurt' is answered by 'doesn't', and the verse, titled 'A Nonsense Rhyme in Blank Verse', ends on the word 'Hornet'.

Which Limerick-born broadcaster was the BBC's Eurovision Song Contest commentator from the 1970s until 2008?

Terry Wogan, a grocer's son from the city, also read out listeners' limericks on his BBC radio show, breaking off after a line or two once everyone could guess the rude rhyme to come.