About RhymesOnline

Free rhyme tools and guides that match words by sound.

What this site is

RhymesOnline helps you find words that rhyme. You can look up a word, compare two words, build end words for a rhyme scheme and read short guides on how rhyme works. Everything is free and needs no account.

The people who use it are mostly students, parents and teachers, and songwriters and poets. The site is run by an independent publisher; there is no team page because there is no team to list.

Where the rhyme data comes from

Words are matched by their pronunciation, not their spelling. The pronunciations come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, an open dictionary of North American English pronunciations written in a phoneme alphabet. Your browser downloads only the small pieces of that data a search needs and works out the rhymes locally, which is why the word you type never needs to be sent to us. Word lists show common words only, ranked with a public word-frequency list, so rare words, names and typos that appear in the dictionary are left out of lists. The two-word checker still accepts them.

How rhymes are defined

• Perfect rhyme: the sound from the last stressed vowel (a secondary stress counts, so anytime rhymes with chime) to the end is the same, and the sound before it differs. Light and bright.
• Identical sound: the rhyming part and the sound before it both match, as when a word only adds a prefix. Light and delight. These are listed apart from perfect rhymes.
• Near rhyme, same vowel: the stressed vowel matches and the ending differs. Day and late.
• Near rhyme, same ending: the ending consonants match, are not empty, and the vowel differs. Cake and luck.
• Eye rhyme: both words have at least three letters, share their last three letters, and sound different. Love and move.

For a longer explanation, see the finder pages and the guides they link to. Perfect versus slant rhyme compares the first two kinds with near rhymes.

Limits to know about

• Words with more than one pronunciation are matched on each one, and the result says so. Accents differ, so a rhyme in one accent may not be a rhyme in another.
• Names, new words and rare words may be missing. If a word is not in the dictionary the tools say so instead of guessing.
• Only single words are supported, not phrases.
• Results are for learning and writing. They are not a substitute for a printed dictionary or your own ear.

Found a wrong rhyme or a missing word? See the contact page. You can also read the privacy policy and the terms of use, or go straight to the rhyme finder.

Data sources

• CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (cmudict), maintained by the CMU Sphinx project. It supplies the pronunciations. Licence: BSD 2-Clause, as stated in the LICENSE file of the cmusphinx/cmudict repository.
• Word-frequency list (count_1w.txt) by Peter Norvig, derived from the Google Web Trillion Word Corpus. It ranks words by how common they are. Licence: MIT.