Dictionary

This rhyming dictionary contains words and sounds suitable for use in poetry written for the Scottish pronunciation of English. I wrote this to combat my documented frustrations with existing online rhyming dictionaries.

I've used the term "Final-Stressed" to describe the words, as it only includes rhymes where there is stress on the final syllable — either a primary or secondary stress. So in this dictionary you'll find rhymes for "deter" (i.e. stress on ER, e.g. detER) but not "better" (i.e. stress on BET, e.g. BETter).

Another term for these words is "masculine rhymes" but arbitrarily assigning genders to abstract concepts in the 21st century is problematic, so I've used the term "Final-Stressed".

This provides a set of rhymes decluttered of duplicates, spelling variations, and metrically incompatiable words when writing Scottish-English poetry which strictly adheres to rhyme scheme and iambic or anapestic meter.

The site has been designed to provide a high-performance, accessible, and clutter-free rhyming dictionary to visitors.

The compilation of this dictionary has been underpinned by the following editorial principles:

• Principle 1 — Final stress only: we only include word with stress on final syllable, traditionally known as "Masculine Rhymes".
• Principle 2 — Rhymes in my own pronunciation (Scottish): For example, long A /ɑ/and short A /a/ are considered the same, as they are not distinct in my native accent (Scottish). So Pam (short for Pamela) and palm (type of tree) are homophones. This will be the same for various dialects of English, but not RP, which is the usual pronunciation basis for British-English rhyming dictionaries.
• Principle 3 — Deduplication: We don't include all the various open compounds of the same word. E.g. we include "grass" but not "lemon grass", "rye grass", or "wheat grass"; nor de we include variant spellings of the same word. And if the word can takes -s as both the plural (e.g. boys) and possessive (e.g. boy's), then only the plural is included. Where it would be unusual to use a word in the plural, the plural has been omitted. E.g. "Readerships" is omitted but "Championships" and "Dealerships" are included.
• Principle 4 — Common vocabulary: I've only included words that I didn't have to look up the meaning of (or in some cases, looked up the meaning and felt like I should have known that word). I didn't want to include obscure that would be challenging for me or my readers to understand, and hinder accessibility.
• Principle 5 — Where the final stress is specific to one class of the word, then that class is noted in brackets, e.g. "compact (v.)", "protest (v.)", "complex (adj.)" to clarify that only that class fits the metre.
• Principle 6 — For acronyms that must be spelt to fit the rhyme, they are punctuated with full stops (e.g. "V.C.R.s), whereas those that are pronounced as a word are presented in all caps, no full stops (e.g. LARP)"
• Principle 7 — We haven't tried to include all proper nouns, but have included some of literary significance, or for words where there would otherwise be few rhymes.
• Principle 8 — We include swear-words and obscenities, but not misogynistic or racial slurs.

Albert Semple is identified as the sole author of this dictionary, having compiled it personally, reviewing each word for compatible rhyme and metre in Scottish-English pronunciation.

The following existing dictionaries were used to inform the long-list of candidate rhymes which were de-duplicated and filtered down for final stress.

• RhymeZone.com — This online dictionary appears to be auto-generated from a corpus of existing poetry, including many open compound words.
• New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary — A physical (i.e. paper!) rhyming-dictionary that includes an intro on the history of rhyme.
• RhymeBrain.com — This online dictionary's pages are generated on-demand using a AI powered phonetic algorithm to identify matches.
• WordHippo.com — Another online dictionary that appears to be autogenerated from a corpus, containing a similar set of words to RhymeZone.
• MoreWords.com — A wordfinder with a "ends with" search, useful for finding words with a common ending.