Rhymes you can actually sing
Sorted by syllable count, and built on pronunciation rather than spelling — which is the difference between a rhyme and four letters in common.
A syllable is a beat you say out loud
Say the word and clap once for each beat. Press one and see.
3 beats
A haiku is five beats, then seven, then five
Three lines, a fixed number of beats in each. This one is four hundred years old — press a line to see where its beats fall.
Five, seven, five. That is the whole rule — and the reason counting has to be right, because one word off and the line no longer works.
Now try it yourself \u2014 find a rhyme, count a line of your own, or write a haiku.
Loading pronunciations…
Type a word. Rhymes come from pronunciation rather than spelling, so night finds byte and love does not find move.
Love, move, dove
Three words ending in the same three letters. Two of them rhyme and one does not, and nothing in the spelling tells you which — you know it only because you know how to say them.
The vowel is the whole story. AH against UW — and every rhyme finder built on spelling gets this wrong, along with tough, though and through, which share four letters and three different endings.
Where a rhyme begins
At the last stressed vowel, and everything after it has to match. Night is N AY T, so the rhyme is AY T — which is why it finds bite, byte, height and sleight, four different spellings of one sound.
It also explains the famous failures. Orange is AO R AH N JH, and no other English word ends that way. Same for purple and month. Silver has exactly one: quicksilver, which is cheating and counts anyway.
Why the results are grouped by syllable
Because a rhyme that does not fit the line is not usable. If you need one syllable to close a bar, reconnoitre rhyming with exploiter is no help however correct it is.
Every result is clickable — press one and it becomes the new search, which is how you find the rhyme two steps away from where you started.
Counting syllables, without guessing
Every syllable counter online works the same way: count the vowel groups in the spelling, drop a silent e, call it done. We checked that method against 124,918 real pronunciations. It is wrong on one word in six.
One word in six is fine for a rough estimate and useless for a haiku, a lyric or anything written to a meter. The Count syllables tab looks each word up instead, and marks any word it had to guess at — so you always know which numbers to trust.
Paste three lines and it checks them against 5-7-5 without being asked.
Where the pronunciations come from
The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, created and maintained by the Speech Group at Carnegie Mellon University. It maps around 125,000 English words to their North American pronunciations and is freely available for any use, including commercial.
CMU asks that anyone using the material acknowledge its origin, so: this tool would not exist without it, and the rhyme groups here are derived directly from their data. The pronunciations are North American, which occasionally matters — a British reader will find one or two groupings odd.
The index is precomputed and loaded into your browser. No request is made per search, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.
For letters rather than sounds, the word finder searches by spelling — words ending in a particular string, which is a different question and sometimes the one you want. And the readability checker counts syllables across a whole piece.
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