Rhyming Words
You might think that rhyming words is a skill you can do without, but if you’re reading this blog, you may well be a poet or song writer. Poets and musicians need to rhyme words often, but it’s easy to fall into the cliched rhymes and rhyming sounds that most every other rhymer has used in the past several hundred years. If so, there’s nothing wrong with consulting a rhyming words source when writing song lyrics or poetry. It’s called pains-taking research.
Rhyme Zone Rhyming Words
A website like RhymeZone allows you to look up any word in the English language and find words that rhyme with it. For instance, I chose the word “puck” and placed it into RhymeZone’s rhyme search engine. I got 89 results, broken up by the amount of syllables in each word. I received 46 1-syllable rhyming words, 24 2-syllable rhyming words, 15 3-syllable rhyming words, two 4-syllable words, one 5-syllable word and one 6-syllable word. So instead of rhyming “puck” with “stuck”, I can rhyme it with such odd words as “schmuck”, “amok”, “mandarin duck”, or “aerial ladder truck”.
I should note that Poetry.com uses the same search function as RhymeZone, so you can expect the same rhyming words search results on both sites.
Rhymer Dot Com
Rhymer.com is a similar search engine for rhyming words. It has a different way of listing words, and it only lists single words – not phrases. Putting in the word “puck”, I received 56 one- and two-syllable words listed in rows of six across. In this case, I received a wider range of single words, as well as words that follow a more literary (poetic) definition of rhyme. Therefore, words like “havoc”, “eunuch” and “stomach” are given as possible rhyming words. The “free online rhyming dictionary” is affiliated with “Write Express”, a website whose stated purpose is “unblocking writer’s block”.
Personally, I would suggest that poets use rhymer dotcom, while song writers use RhymeZone. That’s because song writers typically wish to avoid rhymes that are jarring when sung aloud, while a poet wanting to rhyme doesn’t want their rhymes to sound simplistic or “sing-song-y”. Young (pre-university) poets should know that one of the first things college poetry professors do is tell their students NOT to rhyme their poetry, specifically because simple rhymes are generally cliched and amateur-sounding. This is a way of breaking down students’ preconceived notions of what a poem should look like and sound like, allowing new poets to learn the rules of poetry, learn the true rhyme schemes and develop more mature poetic skills.
So Which Words Are Rhyming Words?
There are intricate rhyming rules in the English language. There are different types of rhymes which are appropriate in different situations. Those who want to write poetry with rhyming words should learn the different terms and types of rhymes, so they will know if what they are doing is strictly correct or incorrect. There are such things as “good rhymes” and “bad rhymes” in an academic sense.
You might be thinking, “If it makes sense and it rhymes, then it’s good.”
But remember that the first rule of poetry is that it sounds good when spoken aloud, because poetry comes from oral traditions where stories were spoken aloud around the fire at night. The poem had to tell a story and entertain while doing so (like a song), and the rhyming words helped poets memorize the often extremely long poems (“oral tradition” meaning the poems were not written down or transcribed, but were memorized from one generation to the next). Even today, when you write a poem, you should take into consideration how that poem will sound when spoken aloud – which is a major difference between prose and poetry.
Basic Rhyming Words Lesson
For instance, let’s look at two or three rhyming terms. A “masculine rhyme” is one where the stress is on the last syllable of the line of poetry, like it would for words like “rhyme” or “sublime”. A “feminine ending” is one where the stress in on the second-to-last syllable of the line, such as when a line of poetry would end with “picky” or “tricky”. Notice how the stress is on “pick” and “trick”.
When you rhyme a word with a masculine ending with a word that has a feminine ending, this is called an “imperfect rhyme”. Now, this isn’t necessarily bad poetry, and can be desirable if you want to break up the natural flow of the poetry to avoid getting into a repetitive pattern. Used in small quantities, an imperfect rhyme can wake your audience up and keep them alert. On the other hand, if your poetry is filled with imperfect rhymes, then it’s going to look and sound amateurish. So a trained poet takes care to know exactly what kind of rhymes they are making, measuring out how they spice their poetry with these rhyming words.
Rhyming Words Glossary
I would suggest you learn the meaning of a number of rhyme terms when starting to write poetry. When you understand what these mean, you’ll understand a good number of the rules of poetry. Some of the terms I would consider learning are: syllabic rhyme, imperfect rhyme, oblique rhyme (aka slant rhyme), masculine rhyme, feminine rhyme, dactylic rhyme, half rhyme, semirhyme, tail rhyme, assonance, consonance and alliteration.
Good luck. If you can absorb all of the rules about rhyming words and still write poetry that makes sense, you’re a better poet than I ever was.
I was wondering, how about “music?” Since there’s a bit of a controversy about how the word “music” does not rhyme with anything in the English language. I thought maybe “pubic,” or “cubic,” or perhaps “acoustic” could be the best rhyme for “music” and not necessarily a letter-for-letter rhyme as suggested by most people such as:
1. abasic
2. agenesic
3. akinesic
4. algesic
5. amnesic
6. analgesic
7. anaphasic
8. anisic
9. antilyssic
10. antiphthisic
All I remember about rhyming is that there’s syllable-based rhyming–commonly used by music artists–not necessarily consisting of similarity in spelling, but in sounds (syllables–sew, hoe, mow, owe, dough), and letter-rhyming with little changes in the beginnings–pocket/socket/rocket/docket. So would “pubic,cubic, or acoustic” be much more closely related in regards to rhyming?
I need a little help on that. Thanks
Ive just self-published my own “elf-ahn-Et-ik alphabetic-phonetic Rhyme Guide” for songwriters, poets, rappers,jingle-writers and anyone who has trouble spelling. It is laid out alphabetically from the first vowel sound AND according to how the word is pronounced, not spelt. Cross references different dialects e.g. class = Ass or ars. Try me out – email with “rhyme guide” in the subject heading.
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