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50 free Limericks trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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Q 01How many lines does a standard limerick have?
Five
The first, second and last lines carry three beats each; the two short middle lines carry two.
Q 02What is the rhyme scheme of a limerick?
AABBA
Lines one, two and five share one rhyme; the shorter lines three and four share another.
Q 03What is the da-da-DUM foot of limericks, two unstressed syllables then a stressed one, called?
Anapaest
The same rolling foot drives 'A Visit from St. Nicholas' and Byron's 'The Destruction of Sennacherib'.
Q 04According to the classic pattern, what does the first line of a limerick traditionally introduce?
A person and a place
The place name lands at the end of the line and sets the rhyme that lines two and five must match, which is why exotic towns are so popular.
Q 05In early limericks, the last line was typically what?
A near-repeat of the opening
Lear's verses often end almost where they began, so the humour lies in the circular nonsense rather than in a punchline.
Q 06The limerick as a verse form first appeared in England in which century?
18th
It was Edward Lear, more than a century later, who made it famous, though the word itself was not printed until 1880.
Q 07The name of the verse form is generally taken to refer to a city and county in which country?
Ireland
One theory ties it to a parlour game whose refrain asked whether you would come up to Limerick.
Q 08The earliest documented use of 'limerick' for the verse, in 1880, appeared in a newspaper in which Canadian city?
Saint John
The New English Dictionary had recorded the first English usage as 1898 and the first American as 1902 before the New Brunswick reference turned up.
Q 09Which folklorist's huge limerick anthology argued the true folk form is always obscene?
Gershon Legman
His first volume, published in Paris in 1953, gathered more than 1,700 of them; a sequel added 2,750 more.
Q 10The compiler of the biggest limerick anthology, Gershon Legman, was also a founder of which craft's modern movement?
Origami
He organised an exhibition of Akira Yoshizawa's paper folding at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum in 1955.
Q 11Which writer popularised the limerick in the 19th century, though he never used the term?
Lear
He was primarily a painter and illustrator, and thought of his verses simply as nonsenses.
Q 12In what year did Edward Lear publish A Book of Nonsense?
1846
It went through three editions, with the verses typeset in two, five and three lines respectively to fit under the pictures.
Q 13How many limericks did Edward Lear write in total?
212
Almost all of them are nonsense literature, each accompanied by an absurd drawing of the same subject.
Q 14Edward Lear was born in 1812 in Holloway, in which city?
Q 21What was the name of Edward Lear's beloved stumpy-tailed tabby cat?
Foss
Servants had docked his tail to stop him wandering, and Lear is said to have designed his new villa on the old floor plan so as not to confuse him.
Q 22Edward Lear spent his last years and died at a villa in which Italian Riviera town?
San Remo
He named the house Villa Tennyson and is buried in the town's Foce cemetery.
Q 23Lear composed musical settings of poems by which poet laureate, the only settings that poet approved of?
Tennyson
He published twelve of them, and lines from the poet's 'To E.L.' are carved on Lear's headstone.
London
His birthplace is now marked by a plaque at Bowman's Mews in Islington.
Q 15Edward Lear was the second-youngest of how many children?
21
His father was a stockbroker; his much older sister Ann largely raised him.
Q 16From the age of six, Edward Lear suffered frequent seizures caused by which condition?
Epilepsy
He felt lifelong shame about it and could usually sense an attack coming in time to leave the room.
Q 17Edward Lear's first published work, at age 19, was a set of illustrations of which birds?
Parrots
He was the first major bird artist to draw living birds rather than skins, working for the Zoological Society.
Q 18From 1832 to 1836 Lear was employed drawing the private menagerie of which aristocrat at Knowsley Hall?
The Earl of Derby
A rumour later claimed the Earl secretly wrote the nonsense books, on the evidence that both men were named Edward and Lear is an anagram of Earl.
Q 19Which invented adjective from 'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' is now in many dictionaries?
Runcible
The other three are all Lewis Carroll coinages from 'Jabberwocky'.
Q 20'The Owl and the Pussy-Cat' was first published in 1870 in a magazine from which country?
United States
It appeared in Our Young Folks before Lear collected it in Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany, and Alphabets the following year.
Q 24Which American humorist wrote the 1910 limerick beginning 'A wonderful bird is the pelican'?
Dixon Lanier Merritt
Merritt edited The Tennessean and was a founding member of the Tennessee Ornithological Society, so he knew his birds.
Q 25The pelican limerick's punchline turns on the pun that nobody can see how the what?
Helican
The joke stacks belly-can and hell-he-can rhymes against the bird's name.
Q 26The 'man from Nantucket' limerick appeared in 1902 in which university's humour magazine?
Princeton
The Princeton Tiger version, by Prof. Dayton Voorhees, was clean; the obscene versions came later, and an 1879 version had appeared in The Pearl.
Q 27Which science-fiction author published Lecherous Limericks in 1975?
Isaac Asimov
The book held 100 limericks; he later produced Sherlockian limericks and a joint volume with John Ciardi.
Q 28Asimov's Limericks: Too Gross pairs 144 of his limericks with 144 by which poet and Dante translator?
John Ciardi
The title is a pun: two gross is 288, the total number of verses in the book.
Q 29The British wordplay expert Leigh Mercer devised a famous limerick made entirely of what?
A mathematical equation
Read aloud, twelve plus a hundred and forty-four plus twenty and so on scans perfectly, and the sum really does equal nine squared plus nothing.
Q 30The film reviewer Ezra Haber Glenn blends limericks with movie criticism under what name?
Filmericks
One of his subjects was De Sica's neorealist classic Bicycle Thieves.