Bookraft

Rhymesaurus is a gift to poets, word hummers and punners.
or the sound and audio ripple of words with a dash of meaning as added spice - they will love the antediluvian-named Rhymesuarus. Lets get down to the basic facts: Rhymesaurus looks at rhyme and rhythm in words in many ways:

- Perfect/Normative rhymes- -perfect match up to the first syllable(swallow, follow)
- Light rhymes - come in pairs, with stress on last syllable - and not(vivid, hid)
- Final Syllable rhymes - just the final syllable is a perfect rhyme(porcupine, align)
- First Syllable rhymes - just the first syllable is a perfect rhyme(fort, forehead)
- Back rhymes - reverse rhymes on the first syllable
- Reverse First Syllable rhymes- are like Final Syllable rhymes, except on the first syllable sound. Reverse First Syllable, Back Rhymes, and First Syllable rhymes are the sturdy stuffings of stalwart alliterations.
- Homophones - are punful stuff, words that sound alike but are spelled differently
- Consonance - words with the same final consonant sound (rack, trick, quirk)
- Double Consonance- final two consonant sounds are the same(back, bake)
- Full Consonance - all the consonants in the word sound alike (fallon, fillin)
- Assonance - the vowel sound of the last syllable correspond
- Full Assonance & End Consonant - all the vowels correspond plus the final consonant, this is a special, often (sing ring) rhyme
- Sight rhymes - the words look like but don't rhyme (blood, good or love, prove)
- Half-double rhymes - the last syllable of one word rhymes midway of another (back, cracker)
- Amphisbaenic rhymes - the consonants are reversed in the pseudo rhyme (chic, quiche or tail, late)
- Elided rhymes - like vivid, lived depends on the last syllable going silent
- Begins With - think of this as a massive list of possible alliterations
- Ends With - think of this as a massive list of perfect rhymes
- Contains - thinks of this as a list of possible inner rhymes
So as one can quickly see Rhymesurus knows words and their sounds. In fact, the Rhymesaurus dictionary has two major parts - semantic meanings and links(thesaurus, parts of speech, etc) plus a parsing of the sounds of every word. It is the latter sound parsing that drives Rhymesaurus ability to produce such an outporing of word soudings like a dance of syllables.

Sometimes this poet finds stroking the lyre of Rhymesaurus word sound tracks is more than enough to trigger an episodic if not rhapsodic response. Other times, when plotting a series of end rhymes, Rhymesaurus is invaluable in adding words like the spice of soupcons and options. In short, for the sound of word music in English, Rhymesaurus is unrivaled.

But There is More

Rhmesaurus has a dictionary, which, unlike Wordweb or Anagram Genius, is fairly complete lacking only the eytomology/origins of words. In contrast I found the Thesaurus more disappointing. Many words lacked a thesaurus entry even though they had almost the equivalent available in the definitions. As it turns out, the Word Surf option helps to explain the situation.

The Word Surf option allows one to explore a word and its meanings in a number of dimensions including synonyms-similar meanings, antonym-opposite meanings, type of-derivative meanings both for allparts of speech for which the word qualifies, attributes - partial alternate meanings, types - genralized meanings, and similar - variations on synonyms. Word Surfing is very rich indeed.

But there is a problem. Not all the words in the Rhymesaurus dictionary have Word Surfing capability. I would gues about 60-80%. And some words only offer a few of the above word refinements. For example, "feint" only has types - no synonym, antonym, etc. And in general, of all the word tools I use including Word Web, Crossword Compiler, Anagram Genius, OpenOffice Writer, Scrabble Words - Rhymesaurus has surpised me with the most missing words. Not a lot - but "sleaze", "qwerty", and "interoperable" are among the missing. I think the problem is that the underlying logic for Word Surf and the sound parsing of words is non-trivial. So for other dictionaries, especially for spell-check ones, a new word entry is relatively trivial - not so in the case of Rhymesaurus.

But the price of admission into the Sound of Word Music that is Rhymesaurus at $35US is so attractive this poet-but-you-would-not-know-it finds Rhymesaurus well worth every penny.