- 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
cat / pad — AE vowel; T and D are both stops
| Plosives | Fricatives | Nasals | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voiced | b | d | g | v | TH | z | zh | j | m | n | ng |
| Unvoiced | p | t | k | f | th | s | sh | ch | |||
Each column is a family pair — same place + manner, only the voicing differs.
love / loved — extra D on one side
cried / cry — one side missing the final D
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.
love / live — both end in V; AH versus IH
Churning out a cancer for the vandal squadSample chop
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.