Q: What is B-Rhymes?

A: It’s a dictionary that shows you words that have a high degree of consonance, or similarity. A normal rhyming dictionary shows you words that fully rhyme, i.e. they are exactly the same in their last 1,2 or 3 syllables. B-Rhymes, aka slant rhymes, can have sounds that don’t rhyme, but still sound similar, so they still sound good together.

Q: Why slant rhymes when you could have full rhymes?

Slant rhymes still sound good, and have the advantage of being novel. People yawn once again hearing ‘lie’ rhymed with ‘die’. A few unexpected B-Rhymes sprinkled around surprises people and makes them pay attention.

Q: How does B-Rhymes know what almost rhymes?

A: It’s mostly based on the number of phonetic features that are different between two sounds. eg ‘t’ and ‘d’ are the same, except that ‘d’ is voiced and ‘t’ isn’t. With only a single difference ‘t’->’d’ gets a high rating, almost as high as ‘t’->’t’. In a regular rhyming dictionary t->d gets the rhyme thrown out. I suggest reading up on linguistics and phonology for more details.

Q: What’s with the name ‘B-Rhymes’?

A: They’re not A-Rhymes, they’re B-Rhymes, like b-celebrities. I guess C-Rhymes are words that don’t rhyme at all, aka Fail Rhymes.

Q: What do the scores mean?

The scores are the total of the ratings of each pair of sounds from the two words. The more syllables that (almost) rhyme, and the closer they almost rhyme, the higher the score.

Eg, consider B-Rhymes with ‘flexible’. Why does ‘lexical’ get a better score than indelible?

Near rhymes with Flexible

Even though the last syllable is a slant rhyme, flexible->lexical gets a higher score than flexible->indelible (a full rhyme) because it has additional sounds that rhyme earlier in the word.