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Q: What one and two syllable English words are hard to rhyme?


A:

In ''The Poet's Craft Book'', Clement Wood defines "rhyme" thus:

    Rhyme is the identity in sound of an accented vowel in a word,
    usually the last one accented, and of all consonantal and vowel
    sounds following it; with a difference in the sound of the
    consonant immediately preceding the accented vowel.

A few pages later Wood says:

    If a poet commences,

            October is the wildest month,

    he has estopped himself from any rhyme; since "month" has no rhyme
    in English.

"Month," "silver," and "orange" are frequently cited as words that
cannot be rhymed.  But this is not so.  Below is a list of words that
are difficult to rhyme, but that have either true rhymes that are rare
words or vowel rhymes.  Vowel rhyme (or "assonance") consists of
identity of final accented vowel sound, with dissimilarity of
subsequent consonantal and unaccented vowel sounds.


 Word            Rhyme                                   Assonance
 --------------- --------------------------------------- --------------
 aitch           brache [[[NI2+]], taich [[[NI2+]]           naish
 angry           unangry [[[NI2+]]                         aggry
 angst                                                   lanx
 beards          weirds
 breadth                                                 death
 bulb                                                    pulp
 carpet          charpit
 chimney         timne, polymny [[[NI2+]]
 cusp            wusp [[[NI2]]                             bust
 depth                                                   stepped
 eighth                                                  faith
 else            fels                                    belts
 exit            direxit [[[RHD+]]                         sexist
 fiends          teinds, piends
 filched         hilched [[[NI3+]], milched [[[NI2]]         zilch
 filth           spilth, tilth
 fifth                                                   drift
 film            pilm [[[NI3+]]                            kiln
 fluxed          luxed [[[NI3+]], muxed [[[NI3+]]            ducked
 glimpsed                                                rinsed
 gospel                                                  hostile
 gulf                                                    pulse
 leashed         niched, tweesht [[[NI2+]]
 lemon		 Bremen, hemen [[[NI3+]], Yemen
 liquid                                                  wicked
 mollusk                                                 smallest
 mouthed         southed
 month           oneth [[[Note 1]], n+1th [[[Note 2]]        grumph
 mulcts                                                  bulks
 mulched         gulched [[[NI3+]]                         bulged
 ninth                                                   pint
 oblige          cytopyge [[[NI3]]                         bides
 of              sov
 oomph           sumph [[[NI3+]]
 orange          sporange
 pint            jint [[[NI2+]]                            bind
 poem            phloem, proem
 pregnant        regnant
 purple          curple [[[NI3+]], hirple [[[NI3+]]
 puss            schuss
 rhythm          smitham
 scalds          balds, caulds [[[NI3+]], faulds [[[NI3+]]
 scarce          stairs, clairce [[[NI2]], hairse [[[NI2+]]  cares
 sculpts                                                 gulps
 silver          chilver [[[NI3+]]
 sixth                                                   kicks
 spirit          squiret [[[NI2+]]
 tenth           nth                                     bent
 tsetse          baronetcy, intermezzi, theetsee
 tuft            puffed, yuft
 twelfth                                                 health
 wasp		 knosp [[[NI3+]]
 widow           kiddo
 width                                                   bridge
 window          indo, lindo
 wolf                                                    bulls

 Note 1:
Justified by analogy with "thousandth," "hundredth," "tenth."
 Note 2:
Justified by analogy with "nth".  A citation: "The Nature of
Rationality," Robert Nozick, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ,
1993, p. 21

Unless noted otherwise, all words occur in Webster's Tenth Collegiate
Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Springfield, MA, 1994.

 NI3 = Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary
 NI2 = Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition
 OED = Oxford English Dictionary
 RHD = Random House Unabridged Dictionary
 + means slang, foreign, obsolete, dialectical, etc.
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