A rhyming dictionary worth bookmarking online or purchasing?

Webster's New World Rhyming Dictionary: Clement Wood's Updated

This is the rhyming dictionary I turn to first. It's an update to Clement Wood's classic 1943 reference. The phonetic distribution of words took me a while to learn, but it's a great, fast system once you get a feel for it. My only complaint about this update is that it's too large to fit in a guitar case. (I'm comparing it to my paperback of the original Clement Wood.)

Part I of this book is the rhyming dictionary itself. Part II is titled "Guidelines for Effective Rhyme", and the first chapter is the closest I've seen to an Elements of Style for poets and lyricists. Later chapters are a little dry, but they covers the history of rhyme forms, and definitions of stanza forms. Clement Wood could have learned to "omit needless words" here, but it is a good reference.

posted almost 14 years ago

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Neil‭

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I see someone recommends Rhymezone. I've been using it since my copy of Wood's fell apart and it's no substitute: it has multipe repetitions, vast numbers of words that sound as though they were invented by a desperate rhyming dictionary editor, and their idea of what rhymes with what is plain weird. In what variety of English does "what" rhyme with "butt"? It's ugly to look at too.

posted over 12 years ago

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H T Davies‭

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The Song-Writer's Rhyming Dictionary, by Sammy Cahn

Out of print, worth looking for. The introduction alone, an essay by the author about the process of lyric writing, is worth the purchase price. The dictionary itself feels like it was hand=picked, and I suspect it was whittled down from a longer list.

posted almost 14 years ago

CC BY-SA 3.0

Neil‭

423 reputation 9 151 74 0