What is "clerihew"

clerihew \clerihew\ n. a witty satiric verse containing two rhymed couplets and mentioning a famous person.

humorous verse form, 1928, from English humorist Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), who described it in a book published 1906 under the name E. Clerihew.

n. A rhyme of four lines, usually regarding a person mentioned in the first line.

n. a witty satiric verse containing two rhymed couplets and mentioning a famous person; "`The president is George W. Bush, Who is happy to sit on his tush, While sending his armies to fight, For anything he thinks is right' is a clerihew"

A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):