Slant Rhyme
A slant rhyme pairs words that sound alike but don’t match exactly, like time and life or heart and hard. It’s also called near rhyme or half rhyme, and it’s the rhyme most modern songs are built on.
The three kinds of slant rhyme
| Kind | What matches | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Assonance rhyme | Stressed vowel only | time / life · love / stuck · home / stone |
| Consonance rhyme | Ending consonants only | heart / hurt · worm / swarm · bent / ant |
| Family rhyme (near) | Vowel, plus consonants from the same family | time / line (m, n) · cup / tub (p, b) · safe / save (f, v) |
Slant rhyme examples
- Emily Dickinson: “Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all.” Soul / all share the L sound but not the vowel.
- W. B. Yeats, “Easter, 1916”: “I have met them at close of day / Coming with vivid faces / From counter or desk among grey / Eighteenth-century houses.” Faces / houses share the ending but not the stressed vowel.
- Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting”: built almost entirely on pararhyme like escaped / scooped and groined / groaned, where the consonants stay and the vowels shift.
- Songwriting: choruses pair words like alone / home, mind / time or eyes / night constantly. Sung, the shared vowel carries the rhyme and nobody notices the consonants differ.
When to use slant rhyme
Use a perfect rhyme where you want a click of resolution, typically the last line of a chorus. Use slant rhymes everywhere you want the lyric to feel like speech: verses, pre-choruses, conversational lines. Pat Pattison, who teaches lyric writing at Berklee, ranks rhyme types by closeness and recommends choosing looser rhymes to keep sections from sounding too “finished” too early.
The finder above shows slant rhymes for any word, sorted with the closest matches first. Switch to the Near tab for family rhymes, or read about internal rhyme next.
Questions
What is a slant rhyme?
A slant rhyme (also called near rhyme, half rhyme, imperfect rhyme or oblique rhyme) pairs words whose sounds are similar but not identical, usually by sharing either the stressed vowel (assonance) or the final consonant (consonance), as in “time / life” or “worm / swarm.”
What is the difference between slant rhyme and perfect rhyme?
A perfect rhyme matches the stressed vowel and every sound after it (light / night). A slant rhyme matches only part of that: the vowel (light / time) or the ending consonants (light / wait).
Is near rhyme the same as slant rhyme?
Most dictionaries treat them as synonyms. RhymeCraft splits them to be more useful: “near” means the vowel matches and the final consonant is a close cousin (time / line), “slant” means only one part matches (time / life).
Who used slant rhyme famously?
Emily Dickinson is the classic example; her poems are full of pairs like “pearl / alcohol.” Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats and nearly every modern songwriter and rapper use it constantly.
Why do songwriters prefer slant rhymes?
They sound conversational and avoid the predictable feel of perfect pairs like “fire / desire.” They also massively widen the choice of words, so you can say what you mean instead of what rhymes.