Limerick

A fixed verse form appearing first in The History of Sixteen Wonderful Old Women (1820), popularized by Edward Lear, and rhyming aabba, where a-lines have five feet and the b-lines three feet, and where the first and last lines end with the same word (a practice dropped in the 20th century). A limerick has been defined as "A comic poem consisting of one couplet of accentual Poulter's Measure with fixed (internal) rhyme: 3aa2bb3a" (Malof, 204). Lear fused the third and fourth lines into a single line with internal rhyme. See examples authored by such as Gelett Burgess and A. H. Reginald Buller.