Why Are Some Half-Rhymes Better Than Others?

Perfect rhymes are straightforward.

That’s not to say they’re easy; they often have to be dazzling, funny and memorable, and lyricists sweat blood to find the right one. But they work straightforwardly. You take a word like moon, and you substitute in new letters before the stressed syllable to find a perfect rhyme — like June.

Imperfect rhymes are hard.

They’re hard because there’s no formula for finding a good one. Certain websites do exist (e.g. the Rhymezone “advanced rhymes” feature, and also Double-Rhyme), but they’re far from exhaustive. You can’t just mechanically trawl through the alphabet, substituting in new letters at the beginning of the word. You have to use memory and imagination.

Why is this? Well, there’s only one way words can perfectly rhyme, but there are lots of ways they can nearly rhyme. Hop and hot are half-rhymes, but so are hop and hip... and hop and pot.

And weirdly enough, some half-rhymes just feel more satisfying than others.

Let’s see this in action. When you stick muggle into Rhymezone “advanced rhymes”, it offers the following suggestions:

chuckle

double

subtle

fungal

disgruntle

To my ear, those half-rhymes get worse – muggle/chuckle is better than muggle/double, but muggle/double is better than, say, muggle/disgruntle.

What’s going on here? Why are some half-rhymes better than others? How can we find good ones?

There are probably a million answers, but here are three.

1. Good Half-Rhymes Belong to the Same Phonetic Family

This is an incredibly basic fact to linguists and speech therapists, but I never really understood it – or the rhyming implications – until my mentor (and composer-lyricist extraordinaire) Pete Mills showed me. There’s also a brilliant article exploring this idea by Matthew Edward.

These phonetic families include:

Plosives: P, B, T, D, K, G

Fricatives: S, Z, SH, ZH, F, V, TH, CH, J

Liquids: L, R

Nasals: M, N, NG

Glides: W, Y

A “G” sound is closer to “B” than to “NG” – hence why muggle/double works better than muggle/fungal. Notice that “T” is also in the plosive family, so theoretically muggle/subtle should be about as good as muggle/double.

But it isn’t, quite, is it? That’s because even within these families, there’s a hierarchy of closeness. In fact, letters often exist in “voiced/unvoiced” pairs. These include:

G/K (guttural). These sounds are very similar, but you engage your voice on G and not K – so G is voiced, K unvoiced.

B/P (labial). B is voiced, P unvoiced.

D/T (labiodental). D is voiced, T unvoiced.

Gutturals are closer to labials than they are to labiodentals: try saying “Guh, Buh, Duh” to see how the sound moves forward in your mouth. That’s why muggle sounds closer to trouble than subtle.

But the question of voicing is also important. G and B are voiced, and T isn’t (hence why muggle/subtle isn’t so great). But what about T’s voiced equivalent, D? Muggle/huddle works better. Meanwhile, muggle/couple (P is unvoiced) is a little less good. Compare “a couple of muggles” with “a huddle of muggles” to see what I mean. The latter flows better. Voicing is important.

What about “voiced/unvoiced” pairs within fricatives? They include:

Z/S/ZH/SH. Z and ZH are voiced, S and SH unvoiced.

V/F. V is voiced, F unvoiced.

J/CH. J is voiced, CH unvoiced.

A “V” sound is closer to a “F” than an “S”. So novel and fossil aren’t great, but novel and offal are very close indeed.

Notice, also, how these sounds have different “feels”. Labiodentals (D/T) are harsh: Betty bought a bit o’ butter. Liquids (L/R), nasals (M, N, NG) and glides (W/Y) are mellifluous. This has implications when you’re trying to build a certain “atmosphere” in a lyric.

But isn’t this all completely academic? Where’s the practical value?

Well, if you want to find a strong half-rhyme, take your word (muggle) and substitute in letters from the same phonetic family after the stressed vowel-sound (mupple, mubble, muttle, muddle, mukkle). Some of these will form words already (muddle). Some will suggest words (mupple → supple, mubble → rubble).

At some point, you just have to say it and see if you like it.

Still, you may be thinking, why settle for a half-rhyme at all? Why not just keep your standards high and only use perfect rhymes? Read on, Macduff.

2. Half-Rhyme is a Breeding Ground for Impressive Wordplay

All rhyme tacitly sets up an expectation, then fulfills it. Take the following example, from “I Think I Got You Beat” in Shrek the Musical:

I've heard better, I'm just saying.

A for effort! Thanks for playing!

Sad to see a princess suffer,

But I had it rougher.

Both pairs of lines end in two-syllable rhymes. So far, so simple. But forget the context: which rhymes rhyme better?

Sondheim had strong views. In an interview, he once said: “I'm absolutely convinced that people essentially see what they're hearing.” He went on to suggest that suffer is a better rhyme for rougher than tougher – not just because it’s spelled differently, but because it’s a totally different part of speech, and therefore takes the listener by surprise. Conversely, saying/playing is predictable; they’re spelled similarly, and they’re the same part of speech. The lines are funny, and they’re made funnier by the rhyme – but the rhyme itself isn’t the funny bit.

So what?

Well, rhymes often work best when they’re unexpected and weird. June/moon, love/above, heart/apart and world/unfurled have all been rhymed to death. Multi-syllable rhymes are often delightful and funny precisely because they’re new.

And good half-rhymes will often pay a tithe of satisfaction to purchase a world of surprise.

Granted, half-rhymes usually don’t land as well as perfect ones: muggle/chuckle is somehow less satisfying than muggle/struggle. But they open up new vistas of rhyming possibilities. Multi-syllable perfect rhymes are rare: a lyricist may rhyme “cheddar cheese” and “redder cheese”, but leave it at that. A skilful half-rhymer might rhyme it also with “recipes”, “melodies”, “necessities”, “memories”, “whether these”, “energies”, “never sees”, “accessories” and so on. It’s unexpected; it can be thrilling.

Even perfect rhyme aficionados will occasionally sacrifice a tiny amount of perfection in the name of virtuosity. In “You’re Gonna Love Tomorrow/Love Will See Us Through”, Sondheim rhymes bolstering/soul-stirring; he freely admits that they aren’t quite perfect, but they are, of course, fantastic. In “Quinze Minutes” from The Hello Girls, one of Pete Mills’s lyrics goes: “Down from the stratosphere / At us here.” It’s a tremendous and original three-syllable rhyme, even though the ph stops it from being academically perfect.

And you don’t have to be a rhyming puritan to be a great lyricist anyway.

Take Hamilton, one of the great game-changing musicals. Lin-Manuel Miranda has an extraordinary ear for rhyme... but rather than using perfect rhyme sparingly, he hits the audience with a barrage of terrific half-rhyme. The effect is one of extraordinary energy and power:

I’m past patiently waitin’,

I’m passionately smashin’ every expectation

Every action’s an act of creation

I’m laughin’ in the face of casualties and sorrow.

For the first time, I’m thinking past tomorrow

He uses half-rhyme not because he’s lazy or incompetent, but because he recognises that perfect rhyme is excellent for creating one kind of effect, half-rhyme for another. He also recognises that not all half-rhymes are created equal. Really, it’s a misnomer: there are seven-eighth-rhymes (middle/little), one-third-rhymes (world/fold), four-fifth-rhymes (left/deaf). (NB: None of this is official terminology; I’m just making it up.) When you stop insisting on perfection, the lyricist’s job ceases to be about discovering a single mot juste, and becomes one of weighing up different variables to create a matrix of striking near-rhymes.

This is especially true in rap, which has a much richer rhyming tradition than musical theatre. Take the opening lines of “Black” by Dave:

Look... Black is beautiful, Black is excellent

Black is pain, Black is joy, Black is evident

It's workin' twice as hard as the people you know you're better than

'Cause you need to do double what they do so you can level them

Black is so much deeper than just African-American

Our heritage been severed, you never got to experiment

With family trees, ‘cause they teach you ‘bout famine and greed

And show you pictures of our fam on their knees

There are no boring monosyllabic perfect rhymes here. Instead, there’s a sequence of brilliantly imaginative multi-syllabic half-rhymes, flawlessly moving between three- and four-syllable units and generating a kind of relentlessness that matches the message. Needless to say, this is much harder than rhyming June and moon – and the effect is much more powerful.

3. Good Half-Rhymes Often Quietly Strengthen a Line

Rhymes have many functions: to call attention to important words, to make a line memorable, to convey character, to amuse, to satisfy, to dazzle. In a vague, difficult-to-pin-down way, rhymes strengthen a line.

Sondheim said as much in the same interview: “A rhyme can take something that is not too strong and make it much stronger. If you tell a joke in rhyme, it’s twice as funny as it would be if you just told it in prose.” Maybe the best example I know comes from “A Little Priest”, where Mrs Lovett sings the praises of:

Shepherd’s pie peppered with actual shepherd on top.

Substitute “sprinkled” for “peppered” and the joke collapses. And “peppered” is made all the funnier because it’s simultaneously so unexpected and so inspired.

But the strengthening power of rhymes goes beyond making humour more humorous. In his annotations to “A Winter’s Ball”, from Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda points to the following couplet:

BURR: If you can marry a sister, you’re rich, son.

HAMILTON: Is it a question of “if”, Burr, or “which one”?

Everyone spots the rich son/which one rhyme at the end of the lines. But there’s another half-rhyme cloistered in the middle: sister/if Burr. They’re set to the same rhythm. The assonance somehow gives the whole couplet a mellifluous quality. It ties everything together.

This is quite a different use of internal rhyme, I think. Internal perfect rhymes draw attention to their own cleverness. Internal half-rhymes quietly strengthen.

Critics of half-rhyme, meanwhile, object to how unsatisfying they can be. Proponents see this as a strength as well as a weakness. Through their imperfection, imperfect rhymes can sneak under the radar. Here’s another example, from “Moon River”:

Moon River, wider than a mile,

I'm crossing you in style someday...

Oh, dreammaker, you heartbreaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way.

Two drifters, off to see the world;

There's such a lot of world to see...

The cross-stanza half-rhyme between Moon River/Two drifters is strangely beautiful. The second verse hearkens back to the first – a gentle, understated reference that isn’t saying “Look at what a clever lyricist I am”, but “Relax. We’ve moved on a little bit. We’re downstream on the same river. You probably didn’t even notice.”

Would it really be improved if Johnny Mercer had used a perfect rhyme?

Takeaways (Read This Section)

If I lost you at “labiodental”, this is your cue to pay attention! Obviously there are no hard- and-fast rules when writing lyrics, but here are some entirely arbitrary and unauthoritative rules of thumb, according to me:

• There’s More to Life Than Perfect Rhyme. It’s the dominant technique in the musical theatre tradition, and it’s a powerful tool for achieving a particular effect. But other tools are available, other effects possible.

• There’s a Hierarchy of Half-Rhymes. Some consonants are more alike than others. A half-rhymer has to pay even more attention to how a word lands than a perfect rhymer. Pay attention to phonetic families. Say stuff aloud.

• Perfect Rhyme and Half-Rhyme Are Good at Different Things. In obvious rhyme-spots (especially the end of a line), it’s a good idea to favour perfect rhymes or very good half-rhymes because the alternative will be unsatisfying. In less obvious rhyme-spots (across a stanza, or within a line), looser half-rhymes are much more acceptable, and sometimes even have certain advantages.

• Both Kinds of Rhyme Have Larger Lyrical Implications. If you start out using perfect rhyme, you should keep using it; an unexpected half-rhyme will land badly. If you start out using half-rhyme, you shouldn’t aim at formal cleanness and parlour-game cleverness. You should take advantage of the plethora of options at your disposal, (probably) by using longer, more impressive rhymes, and more of them. It’ll be energetic, virtuosic, forceful – and that’s where half-rhyme shines.

Whew! You’ve made it through 2000 words of this nonsense. Happy half-rhyming!

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