Howdy, rhymers!
I currently just use RhymeZone as my rhyming dictionary. It’s pretty good but it’s not perfect. Do you know of anything better? Or anything that I can own or license instead of having to access through a website?
Also, I often find myself wanting a rhyme dictionary plus thesaurus combo - e.g. "I need a word that has something to do with crime and rhymes with “sliced”. Does such a thing exist? If so, I don’t want to waste time creating it myself.
Thanks!
There are physical rhyming dictionaries available in bookstores - probably Amazon would give you the best selection if you’re not opposed to ordering through them. I’m unable to recommend, but as long as you have a current one, preferably including new-fangled “lingo”, that’d probably do for less-obscure rhymes.
It looks like the Datamuse API has this capacity. I tried http://api.datamuse.com/words?rel_rhy=sliced&ml=crime and it promptly spit out “heist.”
(I don’t know how practical it is to access it not through the website. Also, I think it’s the same rhyming data as RhymeZone?)
I think the Datamuse API is exactly what I need, thanks!! The web API oughta be fine - they don’t mind if you ask 100,000 queries a day, which would be a lot even for me. I’ll write a front end to it for the “rhymesaurus” functionality, and share it when I’ve gotten it working.
Thanks again, Matt - this will double my limerick-writing speed!
onelook.com lets you filter by both “rhymes with” and “related to”, but its rhyming is a bit loose. You can also request that words match a particular pattern, so you could look for words which are related to crime and end in -iced or -eist, which can be easier sometimes.
Rhymezone now has a “highlight words related to” box in its results page… sometimes. I can’t work out how it decides whether to show up. (The site’s also heavily American-accented.)
What I REALLY want is a site that will give me two words related to X that rhyme with each other.
I very well may create that, if it doesn’t exist.
I whipped up a no-frills front end to the Datamuse API: http://rhyme.ninja/
so now you can type in “iced” and “crime” and it’ll give you “heist”
or “cat” + “animal” -> “rat”, “bat”, etc.
It’s currently just looking up synonyms, though; it would be nice to generalize it to a broader notion of “semantically related to somehow”. It’s on my to-do list.
Next I’ll add “two words related to X that rhyme with each other”
Could you do “a word related to X, and a word related to Y, that rhyme with each other”? That could revolutionise nonsense verse.
Sure, I’ll do that next.
The initial version of “two words related to X that rhyme with each other” is up now. It’s hit-and-miss - the Datamuse “related words” function doesn’t always return intuitive results, so I may need to extend it. But it’s not bad when it does get results, e.g.
Rhyming word sets that are related to animal :
bovine / canine / equine
cats / rats
dog / hog
dog / hog / wild dog
livestock / stock
Rhyming word sets that are related to farm:
agriculture / aquaculture
block / livestock / lock
cultivate / estate
cultivate / estate / operate
cultivating / operating
cultivation / operation
exploitation / operation
farmland / land
farmstead / homestead
operation / plantation
produce / use
Also it’s super slow. I would need to cache a local copy of the rhyming data (at least) to make it usably fast.
Pairs of rhyming words where the first word is related to crime and the second word is related to heaven:
assassination / salvation
case / airspace
criminality / immortality
criminalization / salvation
fraud / god
sin / tin
victimization / salvation
violation / salvation
Pairs of rhyming words where the first word is related to writing and the second word is related to death :
brief / grief
composition / imposition
institution / execution
penned / end
submission / imposition
I was hoping it’d get “quill / kill”, but “quill” didn’t come up in the top 100 words related to writing. I bumped it up to 1000 and it got a ton more, my favorites of which were “story / gory” and “story / memento mori”, but it still didn’t get “quill / kill”. It’s too slow at 1000, though - I’m going to have to download the CMU Rhyming Dictionary myself if I want this to be both fast and useful.
It’s certainly useful as a proof of concept, though - try it out and let me know what you think.
This is cool! I asked for something where word one related to cheese and word two related to tribute and it tolerably quickly produced pepperoni / ceremony, pepperoni / testimony, and souffle / pay.
I figure if I were able to do enough relational work on the database that would help with my cheese spoonerisms but that would be for another day!
Ah - it’s not the overhead of the web service call that’s making it slow. The default API to the CMU Pronunciation Dictionary is already slow.
time python rhymes.py
[u'diming', u'liming', u'priming', u'rhyming', u'timing']
real 0m1.493s
user 0m1.412s
sys 0m0.080s
I’ll need to preprocess the CMU pronunciation dictionary into a file or DB indexed by the rhyming part.
This is getting nontrivial; time to put it on github… https://github.com/pace212/rhyme-ninja/
Did you forget to push? Or did you intentionally post the github link with just a license and readme? 
It just took me a while to get everything ready. It’s pushed now!
It’s fast now!
For example,
http://rhyme.ninja/cgi-bin/rhyme.rb?rel1=space
previously took 13.6s, and now takes 0.6s
Rhyming word sets that are related to space :
accommodation / location
air / square
floor / pore
place / space
site / upright
slot / spot
Here’s a fun one: Pairs of rhyming words where the first word is related to interactive and the second word is related to fiction
Exciting/writing
Excellent!
Today I reworked the UI to hopefully be more intuitive. Check it out and let me know if you think it’s good, still too confusing, or if you have any suggestions.
Progress:
This one’s for you, @robinjohnson:
Rhyming word sets that are related to “pirate”:
air / hair / swear
air / swear
attacker / cracker / hacker
bit / lafitte
branded / commanded
brave / dave / slave
buccaneer / musketeer
career / commandeer / mutineer
chinese / seas
coast / ghost
cried / replied
daring / swearing
disgrace / face
exclaimed / named / proclaimed
french / wench
gang / hang
hair / swear
handsome / ransom
raider / trader
sailor / whaler
soul / stole