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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.

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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.

loveL AH Vabove, dove, glove, shove
doveD AH Vabove, love, glove, shove
moveM UW Vapprove, groove, improve, prove

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.

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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