How to Use limerick in a Sentence
limerick
noun-
The affair is a glitzy one, ending in drinking games and dirty limericks.
—Chelsey Sanchez, Harper's BAZAAR, 18 Nov. 2019
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Isaac Asimov was enthralled with her and wrote her a limerick.
—BostonGlobe.com, 22 May 2021
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Isaac Asimov was enthralled with her and wrote her a limerick.
—New York Times, 21 May 2021
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And no history of the limerick, or of light verse, can escape his imposing presence.
—Junot Díaz, The New Yorker, 17 Apr. 2018
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The show depicts the event as a loose, boozy affair featuring singing, dancing and the recitation of dirty limericks.
—Daniel Arkin, NBC News, 17 Nov. 2019
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Most people know the limerick’s rigid meter and rhyme scheme—the first, second and fifth lines should rhyme with each other, as should the shorter third and fourth lines.
—Amanda Foreman, WSJ, 6 Apr. 2017
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By definition, a limerick is a nonsense poem of five anapestic lines, of which lines one, two and five are of three feet and rhyme and lines three and four are of two feet and rhyme.
—Richard Lederer, San Diego Union-Tribune, 11 Dec. 2021
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The limerick packs laughs anatomical Into space that is quite economical.
—Richard Lederer, San Diego Union-Tribune, 11 Dec. 2021
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John enjoyed reciting limericks, gardening and watching his children and grandchildren play sports.
—courant.com, 3 Dec. 2019
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None of the impressionistic muddle of rock lyrics for them; their subjects, scenarios and verbal conceits are as clear and legible as limericks.
—Nitsuh Abebe, New York Times, 29 Sep. 2017
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In May 1990, third-grader Taylor Burns sent him a handwritten limerick about a mouse found in a stew.
—Emma Balter, Chron, 4 Oct. 2022
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According to reports, the limerick, below, was publically posted in the bookstore.
—Katie Van Syckle, The Cut, 23 Jan. 2018
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Like Andy Warhol’s soup cans, Slaughterhouse-Five, with its jokes, drawings, risqué limericks and flying saucers, blurs the line between high and low culture.
—Susan Farrell, Smithsonian Magazine, 8 May 2023
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No small children have been rugby-tackled, and no prize-winning limericks have been penned about Turkey's President Erdoğan having sex with a goat.
—Isobel Thompson, The Hive, 26 Apr. 2017
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In Act 2 … the show stops dead while Lewis does a stand-up routine, reciting off-color limericks, Polish jokes and rabbi stories while trying to catch but missing 16 canes that are thrown in from off-stage.
—Lawrence Toppman, charlotteobserver, 20 Aug. 2017
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The study picked 10 commercial large language models by top tech companies — including Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI — and asked the AI systems to make critical pamphlets, write limericks, give reasons if someone should join protests, and more.
—Didi Tang, Fortune, 16 July 2026
Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'limerick.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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