- The syllables' vowel sounds are identical.
- The sounds after the vowels (if any) are identical.
- The syllables begin differently.
- Perfect
- Family
- Additive / Subtractive
- Assonance
- Consonance
cat / hat — same AE vowel, same T ending
the rhymes and the songs that used them
Ends on a stressed syllable — a one-syllable rhyme, or a multisyllable word whose primary stress lands last. The rhyme hits the final beat, the way most rhymes in songs do.
love · dove · today · believe · forgot
Ends with an unstressed syllable trailing the stressed one — always at least two syllables. The rhyme lands a beat earlier and trails off softly.
river · mother · follow · breaking · mountain
Masculine and feminine endings rarely sing together (the rhyme lands on a different beat), so they're kept apart here.
cat / hat — same AE vowel, same T ending
love / loved — extra D on one side
love / dot — both AH, but V and T have nothing in common
Assonance rhymes always have consonants after the vowels, but the consonants cannot be phonetically related.
Off the rhyme scale — identity is repetition, not resolution. Shown so you can spot it, not reach for it.
fuse / confuse — both stressed syllables are 'fuse'
“You think you’d like to play ball with the law?”“Think it might-a been that fighter that you saw
You can look down on it allYou can never tell what you saw
I was your starry-eyed lover and the one that you sawI was your hurricane rider and the woman you'd call
Tiers follow Pat Pattison's stability scale — pick the resolution your line needs, not just the closest sound. Bold words are common in lyrics; a struck-through word with a cliché flag is an overworked pair; a vermilion dot counts how often the pair appears at line end in our corpus of real songs.