Words That Rhyme With Love

Perfect rhymes for love

The Wikipedia article on perfect and imperfect rhymes sets the first condition for a perfect rhyme as: “The stressed vowel sound in both words must be identical, as well as any subsequent sounds.” The sound before that vowel has to differ. For love that means the “uh” vowel followed by a “v”, with a different consonant in front.

One syllable

• dove
• glove
• shove
• of

Two syllables

• above
• thereof

Two of these need a warning before you rely on them:

• Dove has two pronunciations in the dictionary. The bird, which rhymes with love, and the past tense of dive (“she dove in”), which rhymes with stove. Used as a noun it is safe. Used as a verb it is not.
• Of and thereof rhyme with love only in accents where the stressed vowel is the same as in love. In many UK accents the stressed form is closer to “ov”, and the weak form “uhv” is easily lost at the end of a line. Treat both as the weakest of the six.

The dictionary also has rhymes that are not worth your time: names such as Breedlove and Younglove, and the odd compound such as foxglove. Words that just add a prefix to love, such as belove and truelove, are not counted as perfect rhymes at all. The sound before the vowel is the same, so they work like repeating the word.

Near rhymes for love

With so few perfect options, writers lean on near rhymes. They come in two kinds, depending on which part of love they keep. The guide to perfect and slant rhyme has the full definitions, and the slant rhyme finder lists near rhymes for any word you type.

Same vowel, different ending

These keep the “uh” vowel and change what follows it. Many songwriters find this the more natural match when the vowel is sustained, though that is a matter of taste rather than a rule.

Ending in “n” or “m”:

• done
• one
• sun
• come

Ending in “f” or “ch”:

• enough
• tough
• touch

Ending in “d”:

• blood
• flood

Two-syllable choices with the same vowel include mother, other, cover, honey and nothing.

Same ending sound (a “v”), different vowel

These keep only the final “v”, so they are weaker near rhymes.

• give
• live
• leave
• have
• save
• wave
• brave
• drive

Longer options include alive, arrive, survive, believe and forgive. Forgive, believe and survive tend to suit a love lyric.

Look-alikes that do not rhyme

Move looks like a perfect rhyme for love but has an “oo” vowel, so it does not rhyme when spoken. Prove is the same. A pair that matches in spelling but not in sound is called an eye rhyme: in that article’s words, “two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently.” QuillBot’s eye rhyme page lists love and move as an example. The spelling section below lists the other -ove words by sound.

A reader may see a rhyme on the page, but spoken or sung it will not land, so treat eye rhymes as a visual effect only.

Words that rhyme with loved

Loved is not a rhyme for love. The past-tense ending adds a “d” sound after the “v”, so the two words do not match from the vowel to the end. Everything for love above has to be rebuilt for loved.

Perfect rhymes

• gloved
• shoved

That is all of the ordinary ones. Unloved and beloved end the same way but only add a prefix to loved, so they repeat the sound rather than rhyme with it. The dictionary also gives beloved a second pronunciation with an extra syllable (“be-LUV-ed”).

Near rhymes: same “vd” ending

The most useful near rhymes for loved are other past-tense verbs that end in “vd” after a different vowel.

• saved
• waved
• lived

Longer ones include believed, received, arrived, survived, achieved and deserved. Because the endings match, these sound close to a rhyme and give you plenty of verbs for a narrative verse. Lived also has a second pronunciation with the vowel of five, which does not fit here.

Moved and proved look like loved but have the “oo” vowel, so they are eye rhymes, like move for love (see the look-alikes above).

For a same-vowel match, choose words that also end in “d”:

• blood
• flood
• mud
• thud

Words like enough or touch keep the vowel but lose the “d”, so they are looser.

Why love is spelled the way it is

The letters -ove stand for three different sounds in English, and love is the one that surprises people.

• “uhv”: love, dove, glove, shove, above.
• “oov”: move, prove, remove, improve.
• “ohv”: stove, drove, clove, cove, grove.

Nothing in the letters tells you which sound a given word uses. A reader who sees -ove at the end of a line cannot know whether it is a rhyme until they say it.

The “uh” vowel written as o is the odd part. The usual explanation comes from handwriting. Wikipedia’s article on minims says Middle English scribes marked a u that came before m, n or v to remove ambiguity, and that this mark was later replaced by the similar-looking o. It adds: “The resulting spellings have persisted into modern times in words such as come, honey, and love.” In letters made of upright strokes, u, v, m and n were easy to confuse, so o was clearer on the page. This is the commonly given explanation. It does not account for every word, because sun and run kept their u.

The practical point for a writer is that scribes fixed the spelling, but pronunciation kept changing, so spelling no longer predicts the sound. Love and dove are written like move and stove, and sound like above and glove. Rhyming by ear, with a tool or by saying the words aloud, avoids being fooled in either direction. Other words have the opposite problem: words that rhyme with you covers one sound spelled many ways, and rhyme is awkward for a different reason.

Using near rhymes in a song or poem

The perfect rhymes that most people reach for first, above, dove, glove and shove, are the ones a listener expects. That can work when you want the familiar sound. When you do not, there are a few ways round it.

• Move love off the line end. Put love in the middle of a line and end the line on a word that rhymes easily. You are then no longer tied to the “uhv” sound.
  I said the word love and I watched you go,
  and nothing I said could make you stay.
• Match the vowel, not the ending. Love with enough, blood or touch keeps the vowel.
  Nothing I did was ever enough
  to tell you what I mean by love.
• Match the ending, not the vowel. Love with give, leave or forgive keeps the closing “v” This suits a line where the closing word carries the meaning (give, forgive) and a loose sound match is acceptable.
  It is all I know of how to love
  and all I have to give.

Pick one pattern per verse and keep to it, so the ear learns what is being matched. The rhyme finder gives more candidates for any ending.