Rhyme types and rhyme schemes

Rhyme is a promise to the ear. Set up a sound at the end of one line and the listener waits for it to come back. Keep the promise and the line clicks shut. Break it on purpose and you get surprise. Break it by accident and you get a shrug.

Rhyme types, from tightest to loosest

Songwriting teachers (Pat Pattison at Berklee is the best known) sort rhymes by how closely the sounds match. Folk and country writers use the whole range, and the loose end far more than people think.

Perfect rhyme

The stressed vowel matches, everything after it matches, and the consonant before it is different.

stone / bone
river / shiver
highway / my way

Perfect rhymes feel finished and certain. Too many in a row sound like a greeting card.

Family rhyme

Same vowel, but the final consonants are different members of the same sound family. The families that matter:

Sung over a band, family rhymes are almost impossible to tell from perfect ones. That doubles or triples your choices for any line.

Slant (near) rhyme

The vowels are close, or the endings are close, but not both. Some writers split these into assonance (same vowel, different consonants) and consonance (same consonants, different vowels).

home / alone / road     (vowel matches, endings differ)
fall / feel             (consonants match, vowels differ)
again / ten             (regional: depends how you say "again")

Slant rhyme is the native rhyme of folk, country and Americana. It sounds like talk. It lets the singer say the true thing instead of the thing that rhymes.

Internal rhyme

Rhyme placed inside the line. It speeds a line up and makes it feel tight and clever. Here are invented lines with the internal rhymes in capitals:

the MILL went STILL the winter that I turned ten
they CLOSED the LINE and SOLD the SIGN and left us with the wind

Line 2 packs two pairs, "closed" with "sold" and "line" with "sign", into its first half, then lands on "wind", a slant answer to "ten" from the line above. Use internal rhyme for bursts of energy, often in a chorus or a fast verse. A whole song of it is exhausting.

Reading a rhyme scheme

Label each line ending with a letter. Same sound, same letter. X means no rhyme. Here's one invented verse in four schemes.

the water bill came on a Friday in the rain   A
it doubled what we paid last fall, and then again   A
my mother read it twice and set it on the shelf   B
said we'll just have to make it stretch ourselves   B

the water bill came on a Friday in the rain   A
my mother read it standing in the hall   B
she said we'd find a way, we always did, and then again   A
she didn't say a thing the rest of fall   B

the water bill came on a Friday   X
twice as much as last July   A
my mother read it at the table   X
and set it down and didn't cry   A

the water bill came on a Friday in the rain   A
my mother read it standing at the door   B
said it's twice what it was before   B
and folded it and put it back again   A

Notice "rain" and "again" in the first version. Whether that's a perfect rhyme depends where you grew up. Use that freely.

XAXA is the folk default for a reason. Half the lines are free to say anything, which leaves room for detail and plain speech, and the rhymes that do land carry more weight because there are fewer of them.

Use the scheme to mark sections

Listeners feel a change in rhyme pattern the way they feel a change in melody. Common moves:

• Verses loose, chorus tight. XAXA in the verses, AABB or AAAA in the chorus. The chorus feels settled and certain, which is right for the part that states the main idea.
• Same scheme, shorter lines. The chorus keeps the scheme but cuts each line to three stresses. It feels faster without changing tempo.
• Break the pattern on the last line. Three lines rhyme, the fourth doesn't. Use it once, on the line that hurts.

we fought the board in April   X
we fought them through July   A
we packed the hall in August   X
and the vote was four to five   (slant on purpose)

Finding rhymes without a rhyming dictionary voice

Rhyming dictionaries list perfect rhymes and lead you toward words nobody says. Try this instead. Write the vowel sound of the word you need to rhyme. Then run through the consonant families above and say every word that comes to mind. For "road" ("oh" plus d) you get: load, showed, owed, (plosive cousins) coat, boat, smoke, (nasal slant) home, alone, stone, phone, (open) go, slow, know. That's thirteen options in a minute, and most of them sound like something a person would say.