I was on UsingEnglish.com when I saw a forum post from a student asking for help finding a word that rhymed with ‘hurt.’The first thing I did was think up a few words that might help, but then I started thinking that there must be a better way of finding rhyming words.

I am not a programmer, but I do know a little about programming and there is a very easy way to match parts of words in most programming languages. Regular expression let you substitute parts of words with wildcard characters. It is very easy to program a feature that lets you match just the ending of a word to find possible rhyming matches. So I decided to look for an online dictionary that lets you find words that end with the same sequence of letters.

First, I just looked for English dictionaries and tried to find ones that had some sort of matching feature. This search turned up TheFreeDictionary.com which matches the ends of words. But there are a number of problems with this dictionary if you are using it to find words that rhyme:

• Just because the words have the same ending, doesn’t mean they are pronounced the same way.
• The dictionary database includes lots of proper names with no way of filtering them out.
• The dictionary only shows the first 200 results; there is no way of seeing anything past the first 200 matches.

After poking around a little more, I realised that I should look for a rhyming dictionary. I have never heard of rhyming dictionaries, but surely they must exist. Sure enough, I Googled it a got a whole bunch of matches.

Most of the online rhyming dictionaries use the same two or three databases so, even though there has to be hundreds of them, there really isn’t any difference between them. They all find more rhymes than I could come up with on my own, and they all find words that are spelled differently but still rhyme. They all get the job done.

One site, however, stands out because it lets you search all the major databases from the same page: Langenberg.com. Langenberg provides pages of forms that link to different online search utilities. There is a page for searching cooking sites, a page for news sites, a page for search engines, and a page for dictionaries (including rhyming dictionaries). The dictionary page of the site has four rhyming dictionaries, as well as a number of regular dictionaries, computer dictionaries, legal dictionaries, and others. If you desperately have to rhyme; it saves a lot of time.

It’s too bad they don’t have all the online learner dictionaries…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Writing, EFL, ESL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.