Limerick

How to spell limerick

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce limerick

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does limerick mean?

1. nounA humorous five-line poem with a strict rhythm and an AABBA rhyme scheme, often nonsensical or bawdy.

Limerick in a sentence

• The teacher asked each pupil to write a silly limerick about a cat.

• He won the pub competition with a clever limerick that made everyone laugh.

Where does limerick come from?

Language of origin: Celtic

The word comes straight from the name of the Irish city and county of Limerick, whose own name derives from the Irish Luimneach, meaning roughly 'a bare or barren spot of land'. As the label for a comic five-line verse it appeared only in the late nineteenth century, and the precise reason is genuinely uncertain. The most popular explanation links it to a party game in which singers improvised nonsense stanzas and then joined in a chorus said to run something like 'Will you come up to Limerick?'. Edward Lear had popularised the verse form decades earlier without ever naming it, so the place name attached to the style after the fact. Because the word simply borrows a proper noun, its tricky spelling lies in the unstressed middle: the schwa sound hides the second vowel, and writers must remember the 'er' before the final 'ick'.

How the word is built

• limerick (from the Irish place name Limerick, repurposed as a common noun); no internal prefix or suffix