Wilder Rhyme Dictionary

Find rhymes

Type a word and press Rhyme. The results are sorted into groups. The closest rhymes come first, and looser matches follow.

Go to another word

Click the spyglass next to any result to rhyme that word. Use the ← and → arrows beside the search box to move back and forward through your searches.

Collect words

Click a result to add it to Rhyme candidates. A green ✓ shows the word is on your list. Click it again to take it off. Press Copy to copy the list, or Clear to start fresh.

Learn about a word

Point at the eye beside a word to see how to say it, where it comes from, and what it means. Click ≈ to find synonyms and other forms of the word.

See every result

Each group starts with its first few words. Press Show all to see the full list. There you can jump to a letter or a syllable count, and sort by part of speech.

Choose which words to see

Open the filter bar under the search box. Part of speech, Rhyme type and Groups each have checkboxes. Uncheck a box to leave those words out, and check it again to bring them back. General Audiences is on by default and keeps offensive and explicit words out of your results.

Change the look

The gear icon at the top right lets you pick a theme, choose how pronunciations are written, add a background image, and turn on colorblind-friendly colors.

How rhymes are matched

Rhymes are matched by sound, not spelling. For example, crow and dough rhyme even though they look different. The same word with the same filters always gives the same results. A word rhymes from its main stressed syllable to the end, so sunshine rhymes with fun. To rhyme the second part, search shine by itself.

Send feedback

Have a question, an idea, or a word to fix? Email teamwilder@wildercode.com.

The word itself

Click it to add it to Rhyme candidates. A green ✓ means it’s already there — click again to remove it.

Rhyme candidates

The words you click are collected here, listed under the word you searched. The list appears when you add your first word, and it keeps words from several searches. Copy copies the list. The List format menu next to it lets you choose the layout, from lines grouped by search word or rhyme type to a plain comma-separated list. Clear empties the list. Your list is saved in this browser only and is never sent to a server. It stays until you clear it or clear your browser data.

The spyglass

Rhymes that word instead, replacing the results.

Syllable dots

The quiet · inside a word (won·der·ful), shown on every result. Spelling-based, so the split is approximate.

The underline

Marks the part that actually rhymes, based on the stressed vowel. Its color shows closure: strong orange for close rhymes, fading to grey as the rhyme loosens — so you can see how strong a rhyme is without reading the rung name.

Dimmed words

The rhyme lands on a secondary stress, not the main one, so it’s a bit softer. Still usable — just weaker in the same spot.

Missing ≈

Not every word has a thesaurus entry. If there’s nothing to show, we leave off the button instead of opening an empty panel.

Word insight 👁

Point at the small eye beside a word (or tap it on touch) for how to say it — a plain-English respelling like tuh-MAY-toh, not IPA — plus its stress pattern, origin, and every sense the lexicon has, grouped by part of speech — handy for telling homographs apart, like bank the river from bank the money. It only opens on the eye itself, not the whole word, so moving across a page of results doesn’t pop a panel per word. Hovering shows a quick, glance-only preview that closes the moment you look away; clicking or tapping pins it open instead — it stays up, scrollable, until you close it with its own × or the Esc key, no matter where else you click or scroll. Where the origin mentions another word the lexicon has, that word is a clickable lookup too.

Part of speech

Noun, verb, adjective, adverb all start checked, meaning no filtering. Uncheck a box to exclude it — a word shows if it matches any box that's still checked, so unchecking narrows. Leaving just noun checked keeps every word usable as a noun, whatever else it also is. Words missing from the part-of-speech list are left out. Uncheck everything to show none. All is a master checkbox: it always mirrors whether every box is checked, and clicking it is a pure toggle — on turns every box on, off turns every box off.

Rhyme type

All closure categories (perfect … identity) start checked, meaning everything shows. Uncheck a box to exclude that category — useful when you want just assonant matches, say. Uncheck everything to show none. All behaves as it does above. This filters the results you already have; it doesn’t run a new search.

Groups

Which kinds of words the search can reach. Only Common starts checked — everyday words, of any register. A word shows if it matches any checked box, so checking another box adds those words on top and unchecking narrows. Untagged is ordinary vocabulary carrying no register mark and outside the 50,000 most-used words. Common is the 50,000 most-used English words, of any register — a word can be both Common and Slang at once. Slang, informal, dialect, vulgar, archaic, poetic, and nonsense are the remaining register marks. Uncheck everything except one box — say, just Slang — and only that group shows, nothing else leaks through. Uncheck everything to show none. Offensive has no box here — General Audiences, below, is its only control.

Tip: the default is the everyday-word slice. Want the rare and antique stuff too — fluyt, dreich, flyte? Check Untagged, or click All for the whole lexicon.

General Audiences

Hides offensive and explicit words, on by default. It always wins, even if another checked box (like Slang) would normally include one. Checked against an external denylist (LDNOOBW, a widely-used open list we didn't write) plus a small set of Wilder’s own additions where that list has gaps. This is a presentation filter, not a data edit — the lexicon itself is never censored, only what's shown to you. It's deliberately blunt: whole spellings are hidden, not individual meanings, so it favors safety for classrooms and other general-audience use over precision — an ordinary word that happens to share a spelling with something explicit (its dictionary entry, if it has one, may list several unrelated meanings) gets hidden along with it. Turn it off to allow everything through — nothing is lost permanently, and you can turn it back on any time. While General Audiences is on, the Vulgar box above is unchecked and greyed out — the two can’t both be on, and this switch wins. Turn General Audiences off and Vulgar becomes yours to set again.

Rhymes — these land

Perfect · full closurecat / hat

The stressed vowel and everything after it match exactly.

Partner · very strong closurecode / coat

Same vowel. The ending consonants are close pairs made the same way in the mouth, just voiced vs. unvoiced (p/b, t/d, k/g, f/v, s/z…), or both nasal (m/n/ng) or both liquid (l/r). Sound just like perfect rhyme when spoken or sung.

Family · strong closureleaf / lease

Same vowel. The ending consonants are a looser match — any two sounds made the same way (like two plosives, or two fricatives), even from different spots in the mouth.

Additive · partial closurelove / doves

A perfect rhyme with a consonant added on the end.

Subtractive · partial closuretime / high

A perfect rhyme with a trailing consonant removed.

Sound relationships — these echo

These two are rhyme types in Pattison’s system — they sit at the weak end of the closure spectrum, where the ear hears a connection without hearing it resolve. They are grouped apart here because you reach for them differently: a rhyme lands a line, an echo colours one. Words found here can serve as rhymes that sound very loose or conversational. (Identity below is the exception — it isn’t a rhyme at all.)

Assonance · weak closuretime / bind / light / life

Same vowel and the same stress pattern at the end, but the ending consonants don’t match. Only the vowel is marked. Essentially the catch-all for everything that shares the vowel but doesn’t qualify as partner or family. In a longer word every vowel from the stress onward has to agree, not just the stressed one — otherwise “shares a vowel somewhere” would pull in words whose music is nothing alike. In a line: the smokey road rolls home — one vowel carried across four words, which is the effect you are buying. Shorter, in a phrase: flap jack.

Consonance · weakest closuretick / tock / bike / lack

Different vowel, same ending consonants — everything after the vowel, matched exactly. Only the ending is marked. A word ending open on a vowel (free, day) has no ending to share, so it never lands here. The opening sound doesn’t matter: it can differ or match, so tick / tock counts even though both start with t, and so does kick / back. In a phrase: tick tock — same consonants top and tail, the vowel swapped underneath. English is full of these (zig zag, flip flop, ding dong), which is why consonance reads as wordplay where assonance reads as atmosphere.

Identity · not a true rhymehappy / unhappy

Not a different word at all — the same word wearing an affix, so it sounds like a repeat rather than a rhyme (happy/unhappy, help/helped, music/nonmusics). A shared sound before the stressed vowel isn’t enough on its own: belief/relief open with the same l but stay perfect, because “be-” and “re-” are audibly different run-ups. Kept separate so it doesn’t clutter real rhymes.

Anapestic rhyme

Two unstressed syllables lead into the stress, which then closes the word.  understand / reprimand — the same shape as the anapestic foot, da·da·DUM.

Anatomy of a rhyme

In Wilder, every word this app compares is split into the same five pieces, front to back: prefix, onset, nucleus, bridge, coda — the last three together are the rime. This is our own working model, built for what this app needs to decide, not a citation of official grammar or phonetics — see the note at the end of this entry for which pieces are standard terms and which we coined ourselves. Which pieces two words are required to share, and which are allowed to differ, is exactly what separates perfect from partner from consonance and the rest of the ladder in Rhyme categories? above.

dis·cus·sion has all five at once: dis–prefix, c–onset, u–nucleus (the stress), ss–bridge, ion–coda. Nucleus + bridge + coda together (-ussion) are the rime.

The five entries below each cover one piece.

Onset, nucleus, coda, and rime are standard phonology terms (syllable theory calls this an “onset–rime” split). Bridge is this app’s own addition — ordinary phonology folds it into the coda, but it's split out here because it behaves differently under the rhyme rules: always exact, never allowed to bend the way a coda can. “Prefix” is also repurposed — not a morphological prefix, just whatever unstressed syllable(s) lead in before the onset.

Bridge

Whatever sits between the nucleus and the closing sound. Empty in a one-syllable rime (drum); in summon it's the -mm-. The bridge must match exactly — only the coda is ever allowed to bend.

Closure

How completely two words' sounds actually match — the rungs of the rhyme ladder, from perfect down to identity. Its musical counterpart is resolution: how settled a chord feels when it lands. See Rhyme categories? above for the full breakdown.

Coda

The closing sound: the final consonant or blend, or nothing if the word ends open on a vowel (free). The coda is the part partner and family rhymes are allowed to change — swapping d for t, say.

Consonant groups (Partner & Family)

Which consonants partner and family rhymes accept, grouped by how they're made in the mouth — based on the work of Professor Pat Pattison of Berklee College of Music (see the subtitle above).

Partner — tight pairs, matched by place, differing only in voicing:

Manner	Pairs
Plosive	P↔B   T↔D   K↔G
Fricative	F↔V   TH↔DH   S↔Z   SH↔ZH
Affricate	CH↔JH
Nasal	M↔N↔NG (no voicing split, so any pair matches)
Liquid	L↔R (same)
Glide	W↔Y (same)

HH stands alone — no cognate, never partner-matches.

Family — the whole manner class, looser than partner (any two plosives match, not just the place-paired ones):

Class	Members
Plosive	P B T D K G
Fricative	F V TH DH S Z SH ZH HH
Affricate	CH JH
Sonorant	M N NG L R — nasals and liquids share one family here, since neither has a voicing split for partner to claim first
Glide	W Y

Feminine rhyme

One unstressed syllable trails after the stress.  turning / burning — the same shape as a trochaic foot, DUM·da.

Masculine rhyme

The rhyme lands right on the final stressed syllable, with nothing unstressed after it.  time / chime

Metrical feet

The classical names for a stressed/unstressed pattern, one “foot” at a time — older and broader than the rhyme-ending terms masculine, feminine and triple, since a foot can repeat anywhere in a line of verse, not just at the rhyme. Shown as a quiet footnote under Feminine and Triple in the thesaurus popup's “order by stress rhythm” view and a rung's “Show all” grouping.

Foot	Pattern	Example
Trochee (trochaic)	DUM·da	SIL·ver
Dactyl (dactylic)	DUM·da·da	TEN·der·ly
Iamb (iambic)	da·DUM	de·FINE
Anapest (anapestic)	da·da·DUM	un·der·STAND

Nucleus

The stressed vowel sound at the heart of the rime — the a in elate. Every rhyme type matches it except consonance.

Object writing

A timed freewrite (5–10 minutes is typical) where you pick one object, place, or idea — often your song title — and describe it through all five senses plus memory and emotion, writing fast without editing. It's a warm-up exercise from Pat Pattison's songwriting courses at Berklee, used to surface specific, concrete images instead of generic ones. Afterward, pull out the words and phrases that jump out — that's your rhyme list for Rhyme to work from.

Prompt: rust. A minute of object writing might turn up: orange flakes, the hinge that won't give, a chain-link fence going soft at the edges, the smell of an old toolbox, rain that never really stops working on metal, a color creeping in like it's patient. Pull the nouns and images — hinge, fence, toolbox, patient — and rhyme each one.

Onset

The sound(s) right before the stressed vowel — a single consonant (l in e·l·ate), a blend (fl in con·fl·ate), or nothing at all. A true rhyme needs the onsets to differ: swap the onset, keep the rime. Same onset on the same rime is identity, not rhyme.

Phones (ARPABET)

A phone is one distinct speech sound. This app spells each one with a short ARPABET code — letters, not IPA symbols, so it stays typeable (see Respelling below). Singles are one plain consonant (T, M…) or one plain vowel (AE, IH…). Consonants blend by sitting side by side — two separate phones, as in the S T of stop. Vowels blend inside a single symbol called a diphthong (AY AW EY OW OY) — two vowel qualities glided into one syllable, never split into two phones. A digit after a vowel marks stress: 1 primary, 2 secondary, 0 unstressed; consonants never carry one.

elate spells IH0 L EY1 T — IH0 the unstressed prefix vowel, L the onset, EY1 (a diphthong, primary stress) the nucleus, T the coda.

Prefix

Anything before the onset — the quiet run-up syllables a word may open with (e·late, suc·cumb). Many words have none at all (drum, jet). Nothing is ever matched on the prefix, but simply having one matters: it's why belief/relief rhyme (same onset, but two run-ups you can hear apart) while jet/Jed is identity (no run-up on either, so there's nothing left to tell them apart).

Respelling

A plain-English “say it like this” spelling, e.g. tuh-MAY-toh — no phonetic symbols to learn. It leads everywhere in this app; for the rare word the lexicon has no respelling for, IPA between slashes (/təˈmeɪtoʊ/) stands in rather than showing nothing.

Rime

Everything from the stressed vowel to the end of the word — nucleus + bridge + coda. This is the part that has to match for two words to rhyme; what comes before it is the onset. In elate the rime is -ate.

Stress pattern (DUM · dum · da)

The song's beat, one mark per syllable: DUM is the main stress, dum a secondary stress, da unstressed. “wonderful” scans DUM·da·da. The dots beside a word show the same thing at a glance: a filled orange dot is the main stress, filled green a secondary stress, small grey unstressed — and a ring marks the syllable the rhyme is actually measured from.

Syllable dots

The quiet · inside a word (won·der·ful) marking where one syllable ends and the next begins, based on spelling. An approximation, meant as a reading aid.

Triple rhyme

Two unstressed syllables trail after the stress.  fluttering / muttering — the same shape as a dactylic foot, DUM·da·da.

Where it started

The seed of it is Clement Wood’s The Complete Rhyming Dictionary (1936), a public-domain reference from before computers existed to check a rhyme for you. Every one of Wood’s own rhyme groupings was carried in, then checked against real recorded pronunciation data rather than trusted on faith — so a grouping that was true to the ear in 1936 but wrong by modern pronunciation gets corrected, not just copied forward.

What’s layered on top

Pronunciations mostly come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; definitions and part of speech from Open English WordNet, Wiktionary, and the GNU Collaborative International Dictionary of English (a modernized Webster’s 1913); word lists and spelling from ESDB/SCOWL and a few smaller public-domain lists. Every fact in the lexicon can be traced back to exactly which of these it came from, and each source is rated by how far it can be trusted — a published reference work outranks a crowd-edited site, which outranks a mechanical guess. See attribution notices for full credits and licenses.

By the numbers

Entries	315,126
Distinct spellings	291,976
Have a pronunciation	98% (309,624)
Have a definition	79% (248,402)
Have a known origin	42% (132,805)

Version-locked and deterministic

Every release of Wilder Rhymes ships pinned to one exact lexicon build — every file in it fingerprinted, so the words and data above can’t quietly shift under you between sessions on the same version. That’s on top of the determinism Deterministic, not suggested above already describes for results themselves: the rhyme engine runs on fixed phonetic rules, not a ranking or a live guess, so it doesn’t matter which lexicon version is behind it — the same word, same filters, against a given lexicon version, come back with the exact same result every time. When the lexicon itself gets a new version (more words, fixed entries), that’s a new pinned build with its own version number, not a quiet change to the one you’re using now. The lexicon will keep growing over time, with new versions released periodically — and every version, past and present, stays available, so nothing you’ve relied on gets pulled out from under a project mid-use.

Word Insight ties it together

The eye icon on a result (see Word insight above) is this whole lexicon surfacing at once for one word — a plain-English respelling, stress pattern, origin, and every sense the word has, grouped by part of speech. It’s also how the gaps show themselves honestly: a word with no known origin just has no origin line, instead of guessing.

Still growing

This is a pre-release lexicon, and it keeps growing. Common words are covered best so far, and rarer words are being added. Have a correction or a missing word? Email teamwilder@wildercode.com.