RHYMING RULES

Definition: (Courtesy of Webster's Dictionary)

Rhyme, rime

- a. The correspondance of two or more words or verses, of terminal sounds.
- b. One of two or more words thus corresponding in sound.

Thus, rhyming is a matter of sound, not of spelling, and involves the similarity of both vowel sounds and consonant sounds.

Since both vowels and consonants may have different sounds, depending on the word in which they are used, a listing of rhymes needs to be organized by sounds rather than by the vowel and consonant letters of the alphabet.  (See Vowel Selection on the above Searching menu.)

Normally, the corresponding sounds involve an identical accented vowel sound, as well as the related consonants, where the accented vowel sound is the last vowel sound receiving a major accent in the rhyming word.

While the novice may consider any words containing corresponding sounds as rhymes, purists maintain that all rhyming sounds begin with the accented vowel sound and have different preceding consonant sounds.   (Vacation and vacination are rhymes but vacation and extrication are not, since the common sound starts with a preceeding consonant, c, rather than the accented vowel sound, -ation.)

Rhyming words may consist of 1, 2 or 3 rhyming syllables, sometimes called single (masculine), double (feminine) or triple rhymes.
 
Examples are given in the screen obtained by choosing Vowel Selection from the above Searching menu.


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