The State of Rhyme
We took the 20,000 most common words in English, asked each one if it rhymes with anything and wrote down the answers. Some of them lied. We checked.
The short answer
Good news for everyone with a lyric due by Friday: most words rhyme. Of the 20,000 most common words in English, 17,318 have at least one perfect rhyme, and the typical word has 26 to choose from. Stick to the 1,000 words people say all day and it gets better still: nine in ten rhyme, and the typical one hands you 51 options.
Then there are the other 2,682. These are the words that show up to the party and stand by the snacks. No perfect rhyme, not one, in a dictionary of 121,000 words. Some are famous for it. Most are quietly getting away with it, and a few of them are words you use every single day.
The top 20,000 bar includes the other three. Rarer words rhyme a little less, mostly because rarer words are longer, and longer is a problem, as you are about to see.
Length is destiny
Here is the rule: the odds that a word rhymes depend on how long it is, and the graph is not the shape you would guess. One syllable? You are fine. Ninety-nine percent of them rhyme, and the typical one has 90 partners lined up. The one percent who are not fine: month, golf, bulb, pint, wasp. Sorry, pint. Two syllables and the odds slip to 86 percent. Three syllables and they slide to 77, with a typical word scraping together a dozen. Three syllables is the valley. This is where currently and energy live — and, currently, no one has the energy to visit.
Then, against all decency, the odds climb back up. Four syllables rhyme 85 percent of the time. Five or more rhyme 93 percent of the time, which beats two. The trick is that long English words are mostly assembled from the same handful of endings. End in -ation, -ity, -ical or -ology and there is a crowd waiting for you with a banner. Call it the -ation elevator: it only stops on the top floors.
The loners
Everybody knows nothing rhymes with orange. It has been dining out on that for a century. What nobody tells you is that month has the same problem, and so do film, bulb, wasp and golf. Music does not rhyme. Nothing does not rhyme, which feels like it should be against the rules. Problem, window, camera, radio and album are all loners too. Here are the one-syllable loners among the 20,000 most common words:
- month
- film
- else
- golf
- false
- depth
- width
- gulf
- sixth
- whilst
- welsh
- bulb
- elk
- ninth
- beige
- wounds
- warmth
- scarce
- breadth
- pint
- flange
- hearth
- kiln
- wasp
- twelfth
And the most common loners at any length. Count the everyday words. Then count the places. If you are writing a song about Canada, Europe, Germany, India, Florida or Africa, our advice is to put the place name in the middle of the line and keep walking:
- also
- music
- month
- nothing
- problem
- window
- camera
- energy
- radio
- album
- film
- office
- system
- policy
- language
- experience
- important
- something
- welcome
- popular
- similar
- further
- several
- average
- canada
- washington
- europe
- germany
- india
- florida
- africa
- april
The famous four, cross-examined
| Word | Perfect rhymes | What RhymeHamster says |
|---|---|---|
| orange | 0 | Nothing we will admit to. Yes, sporange rhymes with it, technically. It is so archaic that the people who work with sporanges call them something else now. If the botanists will not say it, we are not listing it. |
| silver | 0 | Quicksilver is silver in a hat. A word in a hat is still the same word. Zero. |
| purple | 1 | Purple nurple: a made-up phrase built around an invented word. It counts, because people say it. That is more than sporange can claim. |
| month | 0 | Nothing, and the same goes for ninth, twelfth, depth, width and warmth. English tried an -nth ending once, got a look at it and did not try again. |
Words that only rhyme with themselves (in disguise)
A surprising number of words have rhymes on paper that collapse the second you sing them. Angel rhymes with archangel. Problem rhymes with subproblem. Welcome rhymes with unwelcome, different with indifferent, important with unimportant. Each one is the same word with a prefix stuck on the front, and rhyming a word with itself is the one move a rhyme is not allowed to make. Try it at an open mic and see what happens.
Of the 20,000 most common words, 557 have this kind of rhyme and no other. Count them and 89 percent of common words rhyme. Refuse to count them, which we do, and it is 87 percent. Every number on this page is the honest one. The table at the bottom gives you both, in case you want to argue.
Lonely rhymes
Nine percent of common words have exactly one or two perfect rhymes, and a few of those pairs are load-bearing for the entire history of popular music. Only has lonely and nothing else, which explains roughly every ballad since 1950. Here are the words with exactly one rhyme, and the one rhyme they got:
| Word | Its only rhyme |
|---|---|
| only | lonely |
| family | clammily |
| index | Windex |
| network | fretwork |
| pictures | strictures |
| children | bewild’rin’ |
| previous | devious |
| image | scrimmage |
| every | reverie |
| author | frother |
A rhyme with an apostrophe in it, like bewild’rin’, is one the dictionary allows only when a singer swallows a syllable.
The big families
At the other end of town, a few sounds own half the language. Think of each rhyme sound as a shelf in the dictionary. The -oo shelf holds 388 words and phrases, you through Kalamazoo; the -ay shelf holds 610. The biggest shelf in the building is -ation, with 1,524 on it, and 341 of the 20,000 most common words have moved in. If you need a rhyme for information, you have more choices than every one-syllable loner on this page has put together. Life is not fair, and neither is English.
| Sound | Rhymes on the shelf | Rhymes in the 20,000 common words | For example |
|---|---|---|---|
| -ation | 1,525 | 341 | information, education, location, application, association |
| -ations | 596 | 119 | applications, communications, operations, publications, locations |
| -ay | 610 | 103 | a, they, may, day, re |
| -ee | 413 | 86 | be, we, free, he, see |
| -oo | 388 | 78 | to, you, new, do, who |
| -eye | 431 | 73 | by, i, my, buy, high |
| -air | 360 | 70 | their, there, where, care, compare |
| -ate | 849 | 69 | date, state, great, rate, estate |
| -ide | 400 | 68 | guide, provide, side, wide, inside |
| -oh | 285 | 60 | no, so, go, know, show |
A few you were going to ask about anyway: night has 388 perfect rhymes, heart has 120, love has 53, time has 44 and world has 14. That last number is why so many songs about the world end up rhyming it with girl. Girl is not one of the 14. We have mentioned this to the songs. They do it anyway.
How we counted
The words. The 20,000 most common English words, by Peter Norvig’s counts from Google’s web corpus, keeping only plain lowercase words that are in RhymeHamster. The list is web English, so it has the web’s habits: info, login and sitemap made the cut. Thee did not. We have made our peace with this.
The rhymes. A perfect rhyme here is what RhymeHamster shows with the slant dial off: the stressed vowel and everything after it match, and the sound before it does not. Phrases count (out of rhymes with love, and has for years). A word that is the headword with a prefix on it does not count, which is how quicksilver ended up doing nothing for silver. The dictionary held 121,000 words on the day we counted, October 6, 2026.
The syllables. From RhymeHamster’s own syllable library, the one that prints ca·me·ra on the page and is wrong far less often than you would expect.
Why 20,000. We asked the question of the words people actually use. Widen the net to the 50,000 most common words and the share barely moves, to 86 percent: the answer does not depend on where we drew the line.
The caveats. This is a count of one dictionary, hand-edited by one lyricist and supervised by one hamster. A word with no rhyme here may have one in a dialect, a proper name or a word we have not admitted yet. When we add words, the numbers move. When they move enough to matter, so will this page.
The data. Download the table: all 20,000 words with rank, syllable count and every number on this page. Counts, not rhymes. The rhymes are the hamster’s.
RhymeHamster is a free online rhyming dictionary, hand-edited by a working lyricist. Simon, the hamster, signed off on every number and would like it noted that hamster has rhymes. Questions: [email protected].