A limerick rhyme scheme is AABBA: lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme with one another, and lines 3 and 4 share a second, different rhyme. The long lines gallop on three strong beats and the short lines skip on two. Say "da-da-DUM da-da-DUM da-da-DUM" out loud and you already have the engine of a long line.
Line 1 sets a sound ringing, the two short lines rush the story forward, and line 5 drops back onto the first sound at the moment the joke lands. Your ear expects the return, so the punchline arrives on a click.
In This Article
- What AABBA Means in Five Lines
- The Beat Behind the Rhyme
- Reading Lear's Old Man With a Beard
- Where the Form and the Name Came From
- Choosing How Your Last Line Lands
- How to Write a Limerick, Step by Step
- Key Takeaways
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Turn Two Rhymes Into Five Lines
What AABBA Means in Five Lines
The letters stand for sounds. The first end sound is A. A new sound gets B. When line 5 brings back the opening sound, it takes A again, so AABBA runs: sound one, sound one, sound two, sound two, then home to sound one.
Your ear decides what counts as the same sound, and it decides fast. Say "Duluth" and "tooth." They ring together because everything from the stressed "oo" to the end matches. Now say "cat" and "cut." The consonants match at both ends, but the vowel in the middle has changed, so there's no rhyme.
That's the whole test for a limerick's A and B sounds. Say the pair, listen from the stressed vowel onward, and keep only the ones that click.
The Beat Behind the Rhyme
A limerick runs mostly on anapests: two light syllables and then a strong one, da-da-DUM. Three of them make a long line. Two make a short one.
"There WAS an old MAN with a BEARD" carries three stresses. "Two OWLS and a HEN" carries two. Notice that the long line opens with only one light syllable before "WAS." Limericks often clip that first upbeat, and nobody minds, because the stresses are what the ear counts.
Try "There was an old man with a long grey beard." The added adjectives crowd the ending and make the three-beat rhythm harder to hear. Adding "and" between "long" and "grey" does not reliably fix it. Restore "There WAS an old MAN with a BEARD" to hear the three-beat pattern clearly.
So read every line aloud and tap the table on the underlying beats: three in the long lines, two in the short ones. Unstressed syllables can vary; revise wording that makes that beat pattern difficult to sustain.
Reading Lear's Old Man With a Beard
Edward Lear's A Book of Nonsense, first published in 1846, made the form famous. This is the verse most readers meet first:
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!"
"Beard," "feared" and "beard" give the A rhyme, and "Hen" and "Wren" give the B. Tap it out and the beats fall where the last section says they should: three, three, two, two, three.
The short lines do the heavy lifting here. "Two Owls and a Hen, / Four Larks and a Wren" is a list, and the quick two-beat rhythm makes it sound like birds piling in faster than the old man can count them.
Lear often ended on the same word he'd used at the end of line 1, and he does it here. The repeated "beard" works because the meaning has shifted under it. In line 1 a beard is just a beard. By line 5 it's a birdhouse, and the echo makes that absurdity land harder.
Where the Form and the Name Came From
Lear popularized the form. He didn't invent it. Similar verses were already appearing in children's books in the early 1820s, including Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen. Lear named one of them as his inspiration, a verse about an old man of Tobago:
There was a sick man of Tobago, Who liv'd long on rice-gruel and sago; But at last, to his bliss, The physician said this— "To a roast leg of mutton you may go."
The AABBA pattern is already fully formed there, and so is the trick of making the last rhyme the joke. "Tobago," "sago" and "mutton you may go" is a stretched rhyme that you have to say aloud to enjoy.
Lear never called his poems limericks. The name turned up decades later, toward the end of the nineteenth century. Tradition ties it to a party game in which guests improvised verses and everyone joined in a chorus, "Will you come up to Limerick?", between turns, after the town of Limerick in Ireland.
Choosing How Your Last Line Lands
The final A rhyme gives you four basic options, from a pure echo to a fresh word that carries the twist:
Limerick rhyme scheme: four ways to finish the final A line
| Final-line approach | End words (lines 1–5: AABBA) | Best for | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Repeat the entire first line | town / clown / bee / tea / town; opening → ending: “There once was a clown from the town” → “There once was a clown from the town” | Circular nonsense; a refrain-like ending | Repeats both the opening wording and its A rhyme | Adds no new action; readers can predict the ending |
| Repeat the first line’s end word only | Spain / rain / boat / coat / Spain; opening → ending: “There once was a sailor from Spain” → “He sailed with his teacup to Spain” | An echo with a changed final statement | Keeps the A rhyme while allowing new wording in line 5 | Reuses a rhyme word rather than supplying a fresh one |
| Use a new A-rhyme word for a punchline | coast / boast / night / bright / toast | A comic reversal revealed in line 5 | A fresh final rhyme can carry the surprise | The joke must land on a word rhyming with lines 1 and 2 |
| Use a new A-rhyme word to resolve the story | bay / day / light / night / away | A clear ending to a five-line mini-story | Completes the action without repeating an earlier end word | A tidy resolution may feel less surprising than a punchline |
How to Write a Limerick, Step by Step
This is how to write a limerick from scratch: collect rhymes, choose the payoff, then build the setup and polish the rhythm.
First, pick a character and a place. Place names make good A rhymes, as in Lear's "Old Man of Tobago" source; other words work too, like "beard" in his "Old Man with a beard." Say you choose a baker in Duluth.
Next, build two rhyme banks before you write a single line. For a fresh final A rhyme, collect at least three different words: "Duluth," "tooth," "truth," "youth," "booth." A repeated-word ending can use fewer. For B, collect at least two rhyming words, such as "bun," "done," "undone" and "fun."
Then choose the ending word. Take the one with the most comic potential and save it for line 5. Here that's "truth," because a lisping baker telling the truth is funnier than a baker in a booth. With the ending fixed, the middle lines have one job, which is getting from the setup to that word as fast as two beats allow:
A baker who lived in Duluth Had a loose tooth he'd kept since his youth. He bit on a bun, And the tooth came undone, So he lisps when he tells you the truth.
Now read it aloud and tap the beats. If a line drags, change the words around the rhyme before you change the rhyme. Moving one light syllable often fixes the gallop and keeps the ending you built everything toward.
That's how to make a limerick that sounds easy. The work is in choosing the rhymes, and the reading aloud is what catches the clunks.
Key Takeaways
- AABBA means three lines on one sound and two on another, with line 5 bringing back the opening sound.
- Count stresses, not syllables: three in the long lines and two in the short ones.
- Unstressed syllables can vary; keep the underlying three/two-beat pattern easy to hear.
- Lear repeated his first end word, while the Tobago verse ended on a stretched fresh rhyme. Both endings work.
- When writing a limerick, fix the last word before you polish the setup.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a limerick?
A limerick is a five-line comic poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme. Many open with a stock phrase like "There was an old man of…" or "A baker who lived in…," which introduces the character and the A rhyme at the same time.
Is "Hickory Dickory Dock" a limerick?
Some versions follow AABBA, though their meter differs from the usual anapestic bounce. K5 Learning prints a version with the end words "dock / clock / one / run / dock": "The clock struck one" rhymes with "and down he run." A version ending line 4 with "down" does not give the same exact B rhyme.
What are the rules for writing a limerick?
Rhyme AABBA and keep three stresses in lines 1, 2 and 5 and two in lines 3 and 4. A surprising or witty final line is a convention of modern limericks. The rhymes can be stretched, the place names made up and the subject anything at all.
Are limericks always five lines?
Almost always, though the layout can change while the sound stays the same. Printers sometimes join the two short lines into one line with an internal rhyme, which gives four printed lines that still read as five.
Can the last line of a limerick repeat the first line's end word?
Yes, and Lear did it often. The repetition pays off when the word means something different by the end, the way his "beard" turns into a nest. If the word means exactly what it did in line 1, try a fresh rhyme instead.
Turn Two Rhymes Into Five Lines
Write one now. Before you write any lines, pick a name and a place, then list three words that rhyme with the place and two that rhyme with each other. Choose the funniest of the three as your last word. Then fill in lines 1 to 4 so they lead to it, and tap out three beats, three, two, two and three.