A Name With No Agreed Origin

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The five-line comic form was already circulating in print before anyone called it a limerick. The earliest printed English book collecting the form under no particular name, The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women, reached print in 1820, followed two years later by Anecdotes and Adventures of Fifteen Gentlemen in 1822 and, twenty-six years after that, by Edward Lear's own form-defining A Book of Nonsense in 1846. Lear himself never used the word limerick at all; he called his own verses 'nonsenses.' The word's first recorded appearance for the form is in an 1896 letter by the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley, decades after Lear's books, its own origin as murky as the form's: one popular account ties it to Limerick, Ireland, and a supposed drinking-game tradition among the Gaelic verse-jousters of Croom, though no source connects the word itself to that practice before the late nineteenth century revives the name and the connection both at once.