n.
A light humorous, nonsensical, or bawdy verse of five anapestic lines usually with the rhyme scheme aabba.
[After LIMERICK.]
A light humorous, nonsensical, or bawdy verse of five anapestic lines usually with the rhyme scheme aabba.
[After LIMERICK.]
There was an old man from Peru,
Who dreamed he was eating his shoe.
[U+00A0][U+00A0]He woke in a fright
[U+00A0][U+00A0]In the middle of the night
And found it was perfectly true.
Bibliography
See L. Reed, The Complete Limerick Book (1925); C. P. Aiken, A Seizure of Limericks (1964); V. B. Holland, An Explosion of Limericks (1967); W. S. Baring-Gould, The Lure of the Limerick (1967).
A form of humorous five-line verse, such as:
There once was a young man from Kew
Who found a dead mouse in his stew.
Said the waiter, Don't shout
Or wave it about,
Or the rest will be wanting one too!
A light or humorous verse form of five chiefly anapestic verses of which lines one, two and five are of three feet and lines three and four are of two feet, with a rhyme scheme of aabba. The limerick, named for a town in Ireland of that name, was popularized by Edward Lear in his Book of Nonsense published in 1846.
The noun limerick has one meaning:
Meaning #1: a humorous verse form of 5 anapestic lines with a rhyme scheme aabba
A limerick is a short, often humorous and ribald poem developed to a very specific structure.
The rhyme scheme is usually aabba, with a rather rigid meter. The first, second, and fifth lines are three metrical feet; the third and fourth two metrical feet. The foot used is usually the amphibrach, a stressed syllable between two unstressed ones. However it can be considered an anapestic foot, two short syllables and then a long, the reverse of dactyl rhythm. However, many substitutions are common.
The first line traditionally introduces a person and a location, and usually ends with the name of the location, though sometimes with that of the person. A true limerick is supposed to have a kind of twist to it. This may lie in the final line, or it may lie in the way the rhymes are often intentionally tortured, or in both. Though not a strict requirement, the best limericks are usually those that additionally show some form of internal rhyme, often alliteration, sometimes assonance or another form of rhyme.
The origin of the actual word limerick is obscure. The first known occurrence is from May 1896; the OED first reports it in 1898. The name is often linked to an earlier form of nonsense verse which was traditionally followed by the refrain that ended come all the way up to Limerick?, Limerick being an Irish city. That the older refrain does not match the meter of the limerick has been used to attack this theory. A point in favour, however, is the fact that in other languages, limericks are indeed sung, with wordless (la-la) refrains between them that match a version of this text.
Sections in poems following the limerick form can be found throughout known history, from the work of Greek classic poets to the first known English popular song, Sumer is icumen in (c. 1300) and the works of Shakespeare. Othello, King Lear, The Tempest and Hamlet all contain limericks within longer segments. This example is from Othello, Act II Scene III:
IAGO Some wine, ho!
[Sings]
The first deliberate creation to match limerick form is usually considered Tom o' Bedlam (c. 1600):
Other examples can be discovered from the 19th century. The first book of limericks, though they were not yet named thus, is The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women (1820), followed by the Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen (1822). But the form was popularised by Edward Lear, who has been grandiloquently dubbed The Poet Laureate of the Limerick, in his A Book of Nonsense (1845) and a later work (1872) on the same theme. In all Lear wrote 212 limericks, mostly aimed towards nonsense. In his time limericks accompanied an illustration on the same subject, and the final line of the limerick was a kind of conclusion, which usually was a variant of the first, ending in the same word. This is different from the punchline or twist of the modern limerick, that usually has a proper rhyme. Since Lear's limericks are the best-known examples of the classical limerick, and since these poems were not yet called Limericks, some have retroactively named them Learics, as they are not true limericks in the modern sense of the word. An example:
(Lear's limericks were often typeset in three lines or four lines.)
Ogden Nash is renowned for humorous short poetry, and often used the limerick form:
Writer and artist Edward Gorey also published many limericks, accompanied by his own illustrations. His limericks often play off the humorous tension created by using the normally lighthearted limerick format to deliver grim or horrific content:
For reasons of decency, many collections consist entirely of innocent examples. Amongst the exceptions are several collections by the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who wrote Lecherous Limericks (1975), More Lecherous Limericks (1976) and Still More Lecherous Limericks (1977); he wrote two later volumes in collaboration with poet John Ciardi: Limericks Too Gross (1978) and A Grossery of Limericks (1981).
In 1970, New York's Brandywine Press published The Limerick, a canonical[1] work of bawdy limericks compiled by folklore scholar Gershon Legman, which had previously been printed only in Europe. This was followed by The New Limerick in 1977 (later re-released under the title More Limericks.) The former volume contained more than 1700 verses, the latter about 2700.
Indecent subjects are a recurring theme of many limericks. The less innocent limericks are often considered among the best and the most common:
Two volumes of Lecherous Limericks were written by Isaac Asimov, the well known science fiction author.
The mythopoeic man from Nantucket is also a recurring theme in limericks. For example:
This literary trope can be attributed to the many whalers who once lived on Nantucket and the popularity of the limerick genre in whaling culture.
More typically than the above example, however, man fron Nantucket limericks portray him as a sexually perverse and hypersexual persona. It has thus been suggested that the popularity of Nantucket in limericks stems from the possibility to rhyme it with a number of obscenities.
Similarly Uttoxeter and Exeter have been used as the inspiration for hundreds of limericks:
The limerick is often spelled to make the ending match in orthography as well as pronunciation, especially when the spelling of one of the words is bizarre:
Note: Salisbury was once known to locals as Sarum, Hampshire as Hants, giving:
By further contortion, this can even be extended to the beginning:
There is a sub-genre of poems that take the twist of the Limerick and apply it to the Limerick itself. These are sometimes called anti-limericks.
Some lead the listener into expectation of a rhyme, often indecent, which actually is not used.
Or,
Another limerick, attributed to composer Arthur Sullivan, replaces the rhyme with association:
Others subvert the structure of the true limerick.
Similarly,
And,
This is taken a stage further by this pair of verses:
...and by extension...
...which if completed would be a self-contradiction.
The third member of this pair would be the limerick about the young man from Saint Paul, which would be self-contradictory if it were told at all.
Although limericks have been written in a great number of different languages, many of these suffer from the fact that the meter of the limerick does not adapt well to such languages as, for example, French or Latin. Good limericks can be written in languages that have a similar natural rhythm to English.
The following example is in Icelandic:
A French example, from 1715:
And another French example:
An example in Swedish, attributed to Hans Alfredson:
(There was a young lady from Grnna / who her butt so hard could strain / that she in this hole / could strangle an eel / and even sharpen a pen)
An example in Esperanto from Raymond Schwartz:
(There was a miss in Paris/she slept without a nightshirt/happily she has/and that delighted me/ pyjamas in my valise)
The dodoitsu is a short sometimes comic Japanese poem known as a Japanese limerick.
John O'Mill wrote several well-known limericks in Dutch, or in an intentional garble of Dutch and English, such as:
Limericks Online:
Books available from Gutenberg:
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Nederlands (Dutch)
limerick, vijfregelig humoristisch/ gewaagd versje
Franais (French)
pome humoristique de 5 vers
Deutsch (German)
n. - Limerick
ή (Greek)
n. ά ή έ ό
Italiano (Italian)
limerick
Portugus (Portuguese)
n. - poema (m) humorstico de cinco versos
Русский (Russian)
шуточное стихотворение
Espaol (Spanish)
n. - quintilla humorstica
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - slags skmt, mest i versform
中国话 (Simplified Chinese)
n. - 五行打油诗
中國話 (Traditional Chinese)
n. - 五行打油詩
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 五行戯詩
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) اللمريكيه, قصيدة فكاهيه خماسيه الأبيات
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - חמשיר
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