limerick [L19th] The city of Limerick, on the River Shannon in the west of the Irish province of Munster, gets its name from the Irish for ‘bare patch of ground’. In a country famous for its *crack, or enjoyable sociability, tradition has it that in the past it was the custom for people to improvise a piece of nonsense verse. The audience would then follow every performance with a chorus containing the words ‘Will you come up to Limerick?’ Through this the town gave its name to the humorous five-line poem made particularly popular by Edward Lear in A Book of Nonsense (1845), showing the form predated the name.