Rhyme Dictionary
Find words that rhyme with any word, covering perfect rhymes, near rhymes and the words that famously have no rhyme at all.
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Why this asks a service instead of comparing letters
The obvious way to build a rhyme dictionary is to match the ends of words, and it is worth knowing exactly how badly that fails before trusting anything that does it. The site already ships a 274,937-word English list for other tools, so the test is a measurement rather than an argument — and note that none of it needs to know how a single word is pronounced. The case against spelling can be made entirely from spelling.
| Match on | Distinct endings | Candidates for a typical word | Words with no match at all | Commonest ending |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| last 2 letters | 386 | 10,960 | 32 | -es (36,628) |
| last 3 letters | 3,573 | 3,212 | 768 | -ing (18,920) |
| last 4 letters | 16,526 | 774 | 6,557 | -sses (4,662) |
| last 5 letters | 42,277 | 310 | 22,610 | -esses (4,328) |
There is no setting that works. Demanding more letters cuts the candidate list 35-fold, from 10,960 down to 310 — but it raises the number of words with no partner whatsoever by 707 times, until 8.9% of the vocabulary rhymes with nothing. Loose gives you thousands of junk answers; strict tells one word in eleven that it is unrhymable.
And the answers it gives most readily are the least useful ones: at every length the biggest family is a grammatical ending rather than a sound. The single largest is -es, with 36,628 words in it. Matching letters mostly finds words that share a suffix — "running", "singing", "thinking" — which is the one kind of rhyme nobody was looking for. Meanwhile 47 words on the list end in -ough and 92 in -ove, and anyone who has met "though", "through" and "tough" knows what a letter-matcher would do with them.
How to use
- Enter a word.
- Browse perfect and near rhymes.
- Check the syllable counts for the metre you need.
- Read the near rhymes — they are often the better choice.
Frequently asked questions
What is a perfect rhyme?
Two words matching from the last stressed vowel onward, with different consonants before it — cat and hat, or amazing and blazing. The stress position matters, which is why a rhyme can look right on paper and fail when spoken.
What is a slant rhyme?
A near match, sharing some but not all of the sound — worm and swarm, or shape and keep. Far from being a compromise, it is the dominant technique in modern songwriting and much contemporary poetry, because perfect rhymes have been used so heavily that they can sound predictable.
Does orange really have no rhyme?
No perfect one in ordinary English, and it is the standard example. Sporange, an obscure botanical term, is sometimes offered and stretches the point. Purple, silver and month are in the same position. Multi-word near rhymes — door hinge for orange — are the usual working solution.
What is an eye rhyme?
Words that look as though they should rhyme but do not — love and move, or cough and bough. They are artefacts of English spelling having frozen while pronunciation kept changing, and some older poems contain rhymes that worked when written and no longer do.
Does accent affect what rhymes?
Considerably. Whether words rhyme depends on the speaker — a pairing that works in a non-rhotic British accent may fail in an American one, and vice versa. This is why a rhyme dictionary reflects a particular pronunciation standard rather than a universal truth.
What is a feminine rhyme?
One where the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable, so the rhyme spans two syllables — mother and brother. Masculine rhymes end on the stressed syllable. Feminine rhymes have a lighter, more conversational feel, which is why comic verse uses them heavily.
🌐 This tool looks up results using the free Datamuse word API. The word you enter is sent to that service to fetch results; nothing is stored by this site.