rhyme, the correspondence of two or more words with similar-sounding final syllables placed so as to echo one another. Rhyme is used by poets and occasionally by prose writers to produce sounds appealing to the reader’s senses and to unify and establish a poem’s stanzaic form. End rhyme (i.e., rhyme used at the end of a line to echo the end of another line) is most common, but internal, interior, or leonine rhyme is frequently used as an occasional embellishment in a poem—e.g., William Shakespeare’s “Hark; hark! the lark at heaven’s gate sings,” or as part of the regular rhyme scheme:
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating:
“Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door.”
There are three rhymes recognized by purists as “true rhymes”: masculine rhyme, in which the two words end with the same vowel–consonant combination (stand / land), feminine rhyme (sometimes called double rhyme), in which two syllables rhyme (profession / discretion), and trisyllabic rhyme, in which three syllables rhyme (patinate / latinate). The too-regular effect of masculine rhyme is sometimes softened by using trailing rhyme, or semirhyme, in which one of the two words trails an additional unstressed syllable behind it (trail / failure). Other types of rhyme include eye rhyme, in which syllables are identical in spelling but are pronounced differently (cough / slough), and pararhyme, first used systematically by the 20th-century poet Wilfred Owen, in which two syllables have different vowel sounds but identical penultimate and final consonantal groupings (grand / grind). Feminine pararhyme has two forms, one in which both vowel sounds differ, and one in which only one does (ran in / run on; blindness / blandness). Weakened, or unaccented, rhyme occurs when the relevant syllable of the rhyming word is unstressed (bend / frightened). Because of the way in which lack of stress affects the sound, a rhyme of this kind may often be regarded as consonance, which occurs when the two words are similar only in having identical final consonants (best / least).
Another form of near rhyme is assonance, in which only the vowel sounds are identical (grow / home). Assonance was regularly used in French poetry until the 13th century, when end rhyme overtook it in importance. It continues to be significant in the poetic technique of Romance languages but performs only a subsidiary function in English verse.
Many traditional poetic forms utilize set rhyme patterns—for example, the sonnet, villanelle, rondeau, ballade, chant royal, triolet, canzone, and sestina. Rhyme seems to have developed in Western poetry as a combination of earlier techniques of end consonance, end assonance, and alliteration. It is found only occasionally in classical Greek and Latin poetry but more frequently in medieval religious Latin verse and in songs, especially those of the Roman Catholic liturgy, from the 4th century. Although it has been periodically opposed by devotees of classical verse, it has never fallen into complete disuse. Shakespeare interspersed rhymed couplets into the blank verse of his dramas; Milton disapproved of rhyme, but Samuel Johnson favoured it. In the 20th century, although many advocates of free verse ignored rhyme, other poets continued to introduce new and complicated rhyme schemes.