Tokyo, Meet Pinocchio
A rhyming dictionary made only of dictionary words leaves a lot of common words stranded. So we let in phrases, places, brands, first names and a few famous people. Here is what they rescued.
What a dictionary word cannot do
Take Boston. No ordinary English word rhymes with it. But Jane Austen does, and so does Austin, and if you are in a hurry so does frostin’. Take medicine: nothing in the dictionary proper, but Thomas Edison is right there. A travel visa has Pisa and Ibiza. Kidney has Sidney and Sydney, which is the sort of thing you only notice once somebody counts.
This is why RhymeHamster carries ten thousand modern words, phrases, names, places and brands alongside the dictionary. Not for decoration. For Boston.
| Word | Rescued by |
|---|---|
| Boston | a person: Jane Austen; a place: Austin; a dropped g: costin’, frostin’, defrostin’, exhaustin’ |
| Mexico | a brand: Texaco |
| medicine | a person: Thomas Edison |
| soldiers | a brand: Folgers |
| kidney | a first name: Sidney; a place: Sydney |
| Lincoln | a dropped g: blinkin’, clinkin’, drinkin’, inkin’ |
| trivia | a place: Bolivia; a first name: Olivia |
| latex | a brand: Playtex |
| London | a dropped g: fundin’, crowdfundin’, refundin’, underfundin’ |
| adobe | a first name: Toby; a place: Nairobi, Lake Okeechobee; a brand: Ryobi; a person: Obi-Wan Kenobi |
| Princeton | a first name: Winston |
| engine | a dropped g: avengin’, revengin’ |
| America | a first name: Erica |
| Tokyo | a character: Pinocchio |
| weapon | a dropped g: preppin’, schleppin’, steppin’, sidesteppin’ |
| carpet | a phrase: tar pit |
| WiFi | a phrase: hi-fi, sci-fi |
| disco | a brand: Cisco, Nabisco; a place: San Francisco (or, just Frisco) |
A quarter of the shelf is phrases
Across the 20,000 most common words, 71 percent of the rhymes on offer are single dictionary words. 27 percent are phrases: work of art, fresh start and apple tart for heart; partner in crime, nursery rhyme and turn on a dime for time; ice cream, Ponzi scheme and balance beam for dream. The proper nouns, all of them together, are about two percent. They matter out of proportion to their size, because they tend to show up exactly where nothing else does.
How we counted
The words. The 20,000 most common English words, as in The State of Rhyme. A word counts as rescued when every perfect rhyme it has is a phrase, a first name, a person, a place, a landmark, a brand or a g-dropped form, and not one is a plain dictionary word.
The rhymes. Perfect rhymes as the site shows them, slant dial off. Prefix forms (archangel for angel) are not counted. A phrase that merely ends in the word itself (music video for video) is not a rhyme and is not counted either.
The caveat. What counts as a proper noun worth admitting is a judgment call, made one name at a time. The list grows. Counts are as of October 6, 2026.
RhymeHamster is a free online rhyming dictionary, hand-edited by a working lyricist. Questions: [email protected].