This post, by Ken Meyers, originally appeared on his site on 3/10/13.
Rhyming words are fun, but some words will leave you tongue-tied trying to find a suitable partner. Anyone who has ever dabbled in poetry will tell you that meter is a refined art that requires the poet to have a comprehensive understanding of how the rhythmic structure of words, sentences and verses ebb and flow. A rookie mistake when dealing with rhyming words is assuming that every word has to be an exact match. A close match is often sufficient to convince the ear that it rhymes without breaking the rhythm of the verse of rhyme. These 15 websites are designed specifically to help you find rhyming words, synonyms and other forms of creative word play.
Rhyme Zone – It’s very frustrating to discover that a word does not have an exact rhyme. However, with Rhyme Zone, you may just find the next best thing. The website’s search engine will look for an exact match, but if it doesn’t find one it will return a list of similar sounding words. You can define your search in a number of ways, including near rhymes, similar sounding words or related words. For more relevant listings, you can also organize the search results by both number of syllables and letters.
Rhymer – As well as providing a powerful rhyming search engine, Rhymer is full of great tips and instructions on constructing rhymes. The website returns results based on rhyming syllables. This is particularly useful if you are a poet, as it allows you to construct verses that flow naturally without stretching to make the words match the meter.
Rhyme Brain – This is a multi-lingual rhyming site that includes French, German, English and Spanish, among other languages. The interface couldn’t be simpler to use; you type the word you wish to rhyme into the search bar and the results are posted in tables on the same page. Rhyme Brain also has an extensive blog on rhyming words and alliteration that you can spend hours browsing through.
Enchanted Learning – Finding rhymes the easy way is one thing; learning to use them on your own is quite another. Enchanted Learning provides endless hours of fun with rhyming games and activities. There is a $20 per year subscription charge, which gives you full access to all the downloadable content from the site. However, there is also a large amount of content that is free of charge and doesn’t require a subscription.
Reggie Loves to Rhyme – This site from Scholastic is a fully interactive site for children, with games and activities that use colors, pictures and sounds to help build rhyming knowledge and skills. Scholastic is an international company that delivers educational material to children in over 150 countries.
Read the rest of the post, which includes ten more rhyming word resource sites, on Ken Meyers’ site.