Limericks Trivia
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48 free Limericks trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
There once was a five-line verse form that conquered the English-speaking world, and this quiz is about it. It covers how a limerick is built: the AABBA rhyme scheme, the rolling anapaestic beat, the shorter third and fourth lines, the person-and-place opening, and the twist in the tail. It asks where the name came from, when the word was first printed, and why folklorists like Gershon Legman insist the true limerick is always rude. The middle of the quiz belongs to Edward Lear, who never used the word but wrote 212 of them: his 1846 A Book of Nonsense, his epilepsy and 20 siblings, his parrot paintings, his cat Foss and his villa in San Remo. Then it wanders through the famous ones and their authors, from Dixon Lanier Merritt's pelican and the man from Nantucket to Isaac Asimov's Lecherous Limericks and Leigh Mercer's mathematical limerick, plus the neighbouring forms, the clerihew and the double dactyl. It ends in Ireland, with the River Shannon, the Treaty Stone, Munster rugby and Angela's Ashes. Easy questions suit anyone who has heard a limerick; the expert tier is for poetry buffs and pub-quiz specialists. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the limerick, Edward Lear and the people and places involved, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 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
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'.
Q 02What is the rhyme scheme of a limerick?
AABBA
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.
Q 03What is the da-da-DUM foot of limericks, two unstressed syllables then a stressed one, called?
Anapaest
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.
Q 04What does the first line of a limerick traditionally introduce?
A person and a place
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.
Q 05In early limericks, the last line was typically what?
A near-repeat of the opening
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.
Q 06Which festive favourite gallops along in the same da-da-DUM rhythm as a limerick?
'Twas the Night Before Christmas
'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.
Q 07A 1923 Punch limerick about a 'young lady named Bright', who 'returned on the previous night', pokes fun at whose theory?
Einstein
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.
Q 08An online project launched in 2004 aims to write a limerick for every entry in which kind of book?
A dictionary
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.
Q 09Gershon Legman, who collected bawdy limericks by the thousand, also claimed to have coined which 1960s slogan?
Make love, not war
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.
Q 10The limerick anthologist Gershon Legman was also a founder of which craft's modern international movement?
Origami
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.
Q 11Edward Lear popularised the limerick with which 1846 collection?
A Book of Nonsense
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'.
Q 12In Edward Lear's limericks, the eccentric hero is forever being questioned, scolded or even smashed by whom?
They
'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.
Q 13Edward Lear was born in 1812 on the northern edge of which city?
London
Q 21In Edward Lear's poem, the Jumblies famously went to sea in what?
A sieve
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.
Q 22Edward Lear published twelve musical settings of poems by which poet laureate, who addressed the poem 'To E.L.' to him?
Tennyson
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.
Q 23The limerick that begins 'A wonderful bird is the pelican' is often wrongly credited to which American humorist?
Ogden Nash
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.
Q 14Edward Lear, one of 21 children, was raised from early childhood mainly by whom?
An older sister
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.
Q 15Which lifelong condition did Edward Lear keep hidden, leaving the room whenever he sensed an attack coming?
Epilepsy
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.
Q 16Edward Lear's first published work, begun in his teens, was a set of illustrations of which birds?
Parrots
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.
Q 17From 1832 to 1836 Lear was employed drawing the private menagerie of which aristocrat at Knowsley Hall?
The Earl of Derby
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'.
Q 18Which invented adjective from 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' is now in many dictionaries?
Runcible
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.
Q 19Although Lear was English, 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' first appeared in 1870 in a magazine from which country?
United States
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.
Q 20In his comic verse self-portrait, Edward Lear writes that 'Old Foss is the name of his' what?
Cat
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.
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.
Q 24In the well-known limerick, a pelican's bill 'will hold more than his' what?
Belican
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.
Q 25The most notorious limerick opening is 'There once was a man from' which Massachusetts island?
Nantucket
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.
Q 26Which science-fiction author published Lecherous Limericks in 1975?
Isaac Asimov
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.
Q 27In Edward Lear's poem, the Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a boat of which colour?
Pea-green
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.
Q 28Leigh Mercer's famous limerick, which begins 'A dozen, a gross, and a score', is really what in disguise?
An equation
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'.
Q 29In the title of an Edward Lear poem, which part of 'the Dong' is luminous?
His nose
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.
Q 30Which four-line comic verse about a famous person is named after the middle name of its inventor, Edmund Bentley?
Clerihew
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.