A limerick is a five-line comic poem that rhymes AABBA. Lines 1, 2 and 5 are long, with three beats each; lines 3 and 4 are short, with two; and the rhythm bounces along in da-da-DUM steps. The 50 limerick examples below are 27 published limericks, from Edward Lear onward, and 23 new ones, each with a note on why it works.
The published ones start with Lear, who made the form famous in 1846, and move through anonymous classics and limericks by Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. All of them were in print before 1929 and are in the public domain. The new ones, written for this page and marked as originals, are for kids, work, writers and birthdays.
| Section | What you'll find | Limericks |
|---|---|---|
| SectionThe form at a glance | What you'll findOne of Lear's, with the beats and rhymes marked | Limericks1 |
| SectionEdward Lear | What you'll findThe beard, the bee, the chin, the old man of Whitehaven | Limericks2–13 |
| SectionTraditional limericks | What you'll findTobago, St. Kitts, the lady who rode a tiger | Limericks14–19 |
| SectionBy famous writers | What you'll findRossetti, Carroll, Gilbert, Kipling, Buller's relativity limerick | Limericks20–27 |
| SectionFor kids | What you'll findA giraffe, a dragon, a penguin, a ghost | Limericks28–32 |
| SectionWork and everyday life | What you'll findMeetings, the mute button, a treadmill | Limericks33–37 |
| SectionWriters and writing | What you'll findEditors, deadlines, footnotes, the rhyme for orange | Limericks38–43 |
| SectionBirthdays and occasions | What you'll findA sister at fifty, a retirement, a wedding, a valentine | Limericks44–47 |
| SectionWordplay | What you'll findA tongue twister, an anti-limerick, a Lear pastiche | Limericks48–50 |
The limerick form at a glance
Here is one of Lear's, with the beats in bold and the rhymes lettered. Read it aloud and tap the table on each bold syllable: three taps, three taps, two, two, three.
There was an Old Man of the Coast, (A)
Who placidly sat on a post; (A)
But when it was cold, (B)
He relinquished his hold, (B)
And called for some hot buttered toast. (A)
The ending works by anticlimax. Lines 3 and 4 build a small crisis: it turns cold, and the old man lets go of his post. Line 5 could send him tumbling. Instead he asks for hot buttered toast, the coziest answer to the cold, in the same calm voice as "placidly." This one also ends on a new A rhyme, toast for Coast. Most of Lear's repeat the last word of line 1 instead, as the next section shows.
| Line | Beats | Usual syllables | Rhyme | Its job |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Line1 | Beats3 | Usual syllables8–9 | RhymeA | Its jobIntroduce someone, often with a place: the rhyme sound is chosen here |
| Line2 | Beats3 | Usual syllables8–9 | RhymeA | Its jobTheir habit, quirk or problem |
| Line3 | Beats2 | Usual syllables5–6 | RhymeB | Its jobSomething happens, or someone asks |
| Line4 | Beats2 | Usual syllables5–6 | RhymeB | Its jobIt gets worse, or someone answers |
| Line5 | Beats3 | Usual syllables8–9 | RhymeA | Its jobThe payoff: a twist, a pun, or Lear's return to line 1 |
The rhythm is anapestic: two light syllables before each beat, da-da-DUM, the gallop of "'Twas the night before Christmas." Most lines drop one light syllable at the start, so they open da-DUM instead. Some prosodists hear the limerick as amphibrachs (da-DUM-da) instead, and our guide to meter in poetry scans a Lear limerick both ways. Either way the beats fall on the same syllables, and that is what your ear follows.
Edward Lear's limericks
The English artist and poet Edward Lear (1812–1888) wrote 212 limericks, most of them in A Book of Nonsense (1846, enlarged in later editions) and More Nonsense (1872), and drew a picture for each. He never called them limericks. Later editions of the book carry a dedication, dated 1862, to the great-grandchildren, grand-nephews and grand-nieces of Edward, 13th Earl of Derby, and Lear notes that most of the verses were first made for their parents. His pattern is easy to spot: the last line usually repeats the end of the first, often with an unexpected adjective attached.
The wording below matches the 1894 collected edition of Lear's Nonsense Books, which prints lines 3 and 4 as a single line. They are split here so the five-line shape shows.
There was an Old Derry down Derry,
Who loved to see little folks merry;
So he made them a Book,
And with laughter they shook,
At the fun of that Derry down Derry!
Lear's portrait of himself as the book's maker, printed before the dedication. It states the whole program, nonsense to make children laugh, and its last line circles back to its first, the move you'll see in almost every Lear limerick below.
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared!—
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!"
One of Lear's most quoted limericks. Lines 3 and 4 do nothing but count birds, and the count is the joke: the beard has become an aviary, and its owner only says he saw it coming.
There was an Old Man with a nose,
Who said, "If you choose to suppose,
That my nose is too long,
You are certainly wrong!"
That remarkable Man with a nose.
The old man argues with the reader before anyone has said a word. "Choose" and "suppose" rhyme inside line 2, an extra chime that keeps a talky line bouncing, and the last line simply stands back and admires him.
There was an Old Man in a tree,
Who was horribly bored by a Bee;
When they said, "Does it buzz?"
He replied, "Yes, it does!
"It's a regular brute of a Bee!"
Lines 3 and 4 use Lear's favorite frame, "When they said… He replied…": a question and an answer that fit the two short lines exactly. Lear writes "bored", not "stung", and that one odd word is what makes the bee a brute.
There was an Old Man who said, "Hush!
I perceive a young bird in this bush!"
When they said—"Is it small?"
He replied—"Not at all!
It is four times as big as the bush!"
The joke is scale. A bird four times the size of the bush it hides in can't be hidden at all, and the old man is the only one who hasn't noticed.
There was a Young Lady whose chin,
Resembled the point of a pin:
So she had it made sharp,
And purchased a harp,
And played several tunes with her chin.
Lear's comedy is logic carried to the end. A chin like a pin is a problem; a chin sharpened on purpose is a musical instrument. Nobody in the poem finds this strange, which is why the reader does.
There was a Young Lady of Norway,
Who casually sat in a doorway;
When the door squeezed her flat,
She exclaimed, "What of that?"
This courageous Young Lady of Norway.
"What of that?" is the whole character. Instead of a new event, line 5 adds one adjective, "courageous", and the adjective is the punchline. Norway and doorway are a two-syllable rhyme, which gives both lines a soft extra beat at the end.
There was an Old Man of Kilkenny,
Who never had more than a penny;
He spent all that money,
In onions and honey,
That wayward Old Man of Kilkenny.
Every rhyme here has two syllables (Kilkenny and penny, money and honey), which makes the poem bounce. "Wayward" is another of Lear's last-line verdicts: mild, slightly wrong and very funny.
There was an Old Man of Whitehaven,
Who danced a quadrille with a Raven;
But they said—"It's absurd,
To encourage this bird!"
So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven.
Here come "they": the disapproving neighbors who turn up again and again in Lear and punish anyone too odd. They are a motif across the whole book, and they give its sweetness an edge. The Raven did nothing wrong; the old man gets smashed.
There was an Old Man who supposed,
That the street door was partially closed;
But some very large Rats,
Ate his coats and his hats,
While that futile Old Gentleman dozed.
One of the Lear limericks that ends on a new rhyme instead of repeating line 1, and "futile" is a harsher verdict than usual. While he worries about the door, the rats eat his wardrobe.
There was an Old Man of Peru,
Who never knew what he should do;
So he tore off his hair,
And behaved like a bear,
That intrinsic Old Man of Peru.
"Intrinsic" makes no sense here, and that is why it works. The narrator joins in the nonsense with an adjective that sounds learned and means nothing in context.
There was an Old Person of Dutton,
Whose head was as small as a button;
So to make it look big,
He purchased a wig,
And rapidly rushed about Dutton.
Small head, big wig, fast exit. Lear never says why rushing about Dutton helps, which is funnier than any reason he could give.
Traditional and anonymous limericks
Lear didn't invent the form. In his introduction to More Nonsense, signed at San Remo in August 1871, he wrote that the lines beginning "There was an old man of Tobago" were "suggested to me by a valued friend, as a form of verse lending itself to limitless variety for rhymes and pictures." Introducing A Nonsense Anthology (1910), Carolyn Wells passed on the word of "a gentleman who speaks with authority" that the stanza flourished in the reign of William IV, from 1830 to 1837. He remembered the St. Kitts limerick below as current at his school in 1834, twelve years before Lear's book.
There was an old man of Tobago,
Who lived upon rice, gruel and sago;
Till, much to his bliss,
His physician said this:
"To a leg, sir, of mutton, you may go."
The rhyme Lear named as his model. The last line rhymes "may go" with "Tobago" and "sago", two words against one, and the stretch to get there is half the fun.
There was a young man at St. Kitts
Who was very much troubled with fits;
The eclipse of the moon
Threw him into a swoon,
When he tumbled and broke into bits.
The schoolboy limerick of 1834. It ends in disaster rather than in a return to line 1, and the disaster is reported as calmly as the weather.
There was an old soldier of Bister,
Went walking one day with his sister;
When a cow, at one poke,
Tossed her into an oak,
Before the old gentleman missed her.
The joke is timing. The sister is in the tree before her brother notices she's gone, and line 5 saves that fact for last.
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a Tiger;
They came back from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the Tiger.
One of the best-known limericks with no certain author. The smile moves from the lady in line 2 to the tiger in line 5, and the reader works out what happened in between. Nothing is said about eating.
There was an old man who said, "Gee!
I can't multiply seven by three!
Though fourteen seems plenty,
It might come to twenty,—
I haven't the slightest idee!"
A limerick for anyone bad at arithmetic. The misspelled "idee" gets the last line its rhyme and gives the speaker his voice in a single word.
There was a young lady of Venice
Who used hard-boiled eggs to play tennis;
When they said, "You are wrong,"
She replied, "Go along!
You don't know how prolific my hen is!"
The excuse is better than the crime: she isn't wasting eggs, she just has a very productive hen. "Hen is" against "Venice" and "tennis" is another two-words-for-one rhyme.
Limericks by famous writers
Poets, painters and novelists wrote limericks too, sometimes about each other. These eight were all in print before 1929, and six of them come from Carolyn Wells's anthologies.
There is a young artist called Whistler,
Who in every respect is a bristler;
A tube of white lead,
Or a punch on the head,
Come equally handy to Whistler.
The poet and painter Rossetti on the painter James McNeill Whistler, whose paint and fists are equally ready. "Bristler" is an invented rhyme word, which the form happily allows. The same anthology credits Whistler with a limerick of his own, aimed at another painter.
There was a young lady of station,
"I love man!" was her sole exclamation;
But when men cried, "You flatter!"
She replied, "Oh, no matter!
Isle of Man, is the true explanation."
The whole limerick exists for a pun. Say "I love man" fast and it becomes "Isle of Man", the island in the Irish Sea, which is the lady's "true explanation".
There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp;
When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet!"
A parody of Lear credited to W. S. Gilbert, of Gilbert and Sullivan, which Wells introduces as "A Nonsense Rhyme in Blank Verse". It sets up every rhyme and refuses each one: wasp for Bees, doesn't for hurt, Hornet for wasp. It only works because the reader hears the rhymes that are missing.
There was a small boy of Quebec,
Who was buried in snow to his neck;
When they said, "Are you friz?"
He replied, "Yes, I is—
But we don't call this cold in Quebec."
Wells prints this as proof that Kipling, who in her words had "never printed anything which can be called nonsense verse", was guilty of at least one limerick. The boy's bad grammar sets up his boast: he's freezing and proud of it.
There was a young lady of Lynn,
Who was deep in original sin;
When they said, "Do be good,"
She said, "Would if I could!"
And straightway went at it ag'in.
"Ag'in" is spelled the way it's said so that it rhymes with Lynn and sin, and "Would if I could!" may be the shortest moral defense in English verse.
A Tutor who tooted the flute
Tried to teach two young tooters to toot;
Said the two to the Tutor,
"Is it harder to toot, or
To tutor two tooters to toot?"
A tongue twister in limerick form by the anthologist herself. Her book prints lines 3 and 4 as one line; split at the rhyme, "Tutor" pairs with "toot, or". Try it three times fast.
As a beauty I'm not a great star,
There are others more handsome by far,
But my face I don't mind it,
Because I'm behind it —
'Tis the folks in the front that I jar.
Euwer's footnote says the limerick had already been credited "to a variety of different sources" and would be remembered as "the favorite limerick of President Wilson", which is why it is still often attributed to Woodrow Wilson. The self-mockery is the charm: the speaker gets the joke in first.
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
By the British-born Canadian mycologist A. H. Reginald Buller, the University of Manitoba's first professor of botany and geology. "In a relative way" does the physics, and "the previous night" does the joke.
Limericks for kids
From here on the limericks are new, written for this page. These five are clean and silly, with animals and absurd logic in the Lear tradition.
There once was a sneezy giraffe
Who complained to the vet and his staff,
"I've a tickle, a croak,
And it's really no joke:
I am sore for a mile and a half!"
A boy who refused to eat peas
Dropped them under his chair by degrees.
Now a pea vine, bright green,
Is the tallest he's seen,
And it's handing him more, if you please.
A dragon named Flo caught a cold
On the day that she turned nine years old.
Then she bent to her cake
And she sneezed by mistake,
And the frosting turned crispy and gold.
A penguin who wanted to fly
Flapped his wings at the bright winter sky.
When he couldn't take off
And the gulls stopped to scoff,
He just dove in the sea and flew by.
A young ghost who was scared of the dark
Wouldn't haunt the old house by the park.
So he packed up his chain
For a lighthouse in Maine,
Where he spooks passing ships for a lark.
Each one turns on a single exaggeration a child can picture: a sore throat measured in miles, a vine that serves seconds, a sneeze that cooks. The penguin ends on something true, since penguins do "fly" underwater, and the ghost solves his problem in line 4, which leaves line 5 free for a grace note.
Limericks about work and everyday life
The office is a gift to limerick writers: everyone knows the situations, so line 1 needs almost no setup.
A meeting was called for at nine
To decide on a font for a sign.
By eleven, a vote,
By noon, a long note,
And at five they chose last year's design.
A recruit in a brand-new blue suit
Gave a pitch that was sharp and astute.
It was brilliant and long;
There was just one thing wrong:
He'd delivered the whole thing on mute.
I gave my name, Ruth, at a booth
In a coffee shop out in Duluth.
What they wrote on the cup
When my order came up
Was "Wrath," which was close to the truth.
A man who resolved to get fit
Bought a treadmill, a mat and a kit.
By the middle of March
His resolve lost its starch,
And his laundry hangs neatly on it.
My cat likes to nap on the keys
And send emails to whom she may please.
Last week, to my chief,
She wrote something brief,
And he answered, "Agreed. Let's do these."
Notice where the surprise sits. In the meeting limerick, lines 3 and 4 speed through the day in short bursts, so the last line can undo all of it. In the coffee one, the misspelling is the twist and "close to the truth" tells you what kind of morning Ruth is having.
Limericks about writers and writing
Six for people who write for a living, from the novelist avoiding chapter four to the technical writer whose manual is out of date on publication day.
A novelist, stuck on page three,
Made a schedule, a plan and some tea.
She sorted the spice,
Cleaned the oven out twice,
And then wrote this limerick. See?
My editor, Margaret Flynn,
Has a red pen as sharp as a pin.
Of my chapter on Spain
One short phrase will remain,
And she's circled that, too, with a grin.
A reporter named Nora McKay
Had a deadline at noon, come what may.
So she skipped her own lunch
And she filed in a crunch
To an editor out for the day.
A scholar, Professor de Vere,
Wrote a monograph, thin and austere.
But the footnotes below
Have continued to grow,
And the book is all footnote, I fear.
A poet in search of a rhyme
For "orange" lost track of the time.
She tried "door hinge" and "porridge"
And "Florence" and "forage,"
Then she switched to a lemon and lime.
A technical writer named Joe
Wrote a manual, careful and slow.
It was perfect, precise,
And he'd tested it twice.
Then the product changed versions. Oh no.
The orange limerick is a joke about the form itself: lines 3 and 4 are the poet's failed attempts, so their near-miss rhymes are the point. The novelist's ends on itself, a cheap trick that works once per collection.
Limericks for birthdays and occasions
A limerick in a card or a toast should tease the person a little and flatter them more. Swap in the real name, age and one true detail. If the name you swap in lands at the end of a line, it needs new rhymes: ask the Strokes Assistant beside your draft for rhymes on it, then keep the ones that fit something true about the person.
To my sister, who's fifty today:
You don't look it (from quite far away).
You still hike, you still bike,
You still say what you like,
And you're still five years older. Hooray!
In his forty-one years at the bank,
Hank has worked every job, every rank.
He has counted each cent,
Knew where every pen went,
And he's taking them home. Thank you, Hank!
Tom and Priya first met at a gate
Where a train to Penn Station ran late.
They had coffee, then talked,
Missed the next one, then walked,
And the rest, as they say, was their fate.
I'm no poet, my darling, I know,
And this rhyme took a week, even so.
I have written it twice,
Which I hope will suffice:
Will you still be my valentine? No?
The wedding limerick has no gag, and doesn't need one: at a reception, warmth with a smile can land better than a punchline. If it's going into a toast, the best man speech guide covers how long to speak and how to build up to the toast itself.
Tongue twisters, anti-limericks and pastiche
Three limericks that play with the form itself, after Wells, Gilbert and Lear.
A frog who was fond of French fries
Fried a few for his favorite flies.
When the flies flew to feast,
A full flock at the least,
The frog, feeling famished, fried flies.
A poet who thought it was neat
To write limericks, simple and sweet,
Built each rhyme up with care,
Placed it perfectly there,
Then forgot how to finish the line.
There was an Old Man of the Bay,
Who rowed out to sea every day;
When they said, "Is it wet?"
He replied, "Not as yet!"
That salty Old Man of the Bay.
The anti-limerick depends on the reader's ear, which expects a rhyme for "sweet" and gets "line". The Lear pastiche borrows all four of his habits: "There was an Old Man", the "When they said… He replied…" frame, an absurd answer, and a last line that returns with a two-syllable adjective.
What the best limericks share
Read the fifty together and the same few habits keep turning up.
- A person and a place in line 1. "A young lady of Niger" gives you a character and a rhyme sound at once. The place often exists only for the rhyme, and that's allowed.
- The surprise saved for last. In a twist ending, the plain A rhymes go in lines 1 and 2 and the surprising one ("previous night", "on mute") goes at the very end of line 5. Lear's endings move the surprise instead: the rhyme word repeats, and the joke sits in a new adjective ("wayward", "intrinsic").
- A fast middle. Lines 3 and 4 are a question and an answer, two quick events, or a list. Long clauses there stall the poem just before the joke.
- Natural stress. In the examples above, the beats fall where a speaker would put them anyway. If you have to say "moun-TAIN" to rhyme with "again", the line needs rewriting.
- No explanation. Nobody says the tiger ate the lady. The limerick stops the moment the reader gets it.
The usual faults are the opposite of those: filler words to make up the beat ("did go", "you see", "I am told"), word order bent to get the rhyme word to the end of the line, and a punchline that arrives in line 3 and leaves line 5 with nothing to do. If you want the method rather than the examples, the guide to writing a poem compares the limerick with other fixed forms, and our poetry prompts will give you a subject. For other short forms, see the haiku examples and the acrostic poem examples.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most famous limerick?
There is no official ranking, but Edward Lear's "There was an Old Man with a beard", from A Book of Nonsense (1846), is among the most quoted. Among limericks with no known author, the young lady of Niger who smiled as she rode on a tiger is one of the best known, and Reginald Buller's 1923 limerick about the young lady named Bright, who traveled faster than light, turns relativity into a joke.
Who invented the limerick?
Nobody knows. The form was circulating in Britain before Lear: he wrote that a friend suggested "There was an old man of Tobago" to him as a model, and a source Carolyn Wells quoted remembered limericks from his school in 1834. Lear made the form famous with A Book of Nonsense in 1846, though he never called his verses limericks.
Why is it called a limerick?
No one is sure. The usual explanation links the name to Limerick, the city and county in Ireland. Another connects it to a parlor game of improvised nonsense verses with the refrain "Will you come up to Limerick?" Merriam-Webster gives 1895 as the word's first known use for the poem, half a century after Lear's first book of them.
Do limericks have to be funny?
Almost always. Merriam-Webster defines the limerick as a light or humorous verse form, and its bouncing rhythm can make even a sad subject sound like a joke. Poets have written gentle or thoughtful limericks, but they work against the form. For five serious lines, a cinquain or a tanka suits the mood better.
Are limericks supposed to be rude?
Many are. The folklorist Gershon Legman, who compiled the largest collection of limericks, argued that the true folk limerick is always obscene. The printed tradition runs the other way: Lear wrote his for children, and the Victorian and Edwardian anthology limericks on this page are clean. A clean limerick can be just as sharp, because the surprise in the last line does the work.
