Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, author, and poet, renowned for his literary nonsense, in poetry and prose, and especially his limericks, a form that he popularized.

Lear’s nonsense works are distinguished by a facility of verbal invention and a poet’s delight in the sounds of words, both real and imaginary. A stuffed rhinoceros becomes a diaphanous doorscraper . A blue Boss-Woss plunges into a perpendicular, spicular, orbicular, quadrangular, circular depth of soft mud . His heroes are Quangle-Wangles, Pobbles, and Jumblies. His most famous piece of verbal invention, a runcible spoon occurs in the closing lines of The Owl and the Pussycat, and is now found in many English dictionaries.