List of English words without rhymes

The following is a list of English words without rhymes, called refractory rhymes—that is, a list of words in the English language that rhyme with no other English word. The word "rhyme" here is used in the strict sense, called a "perfect rhyme", that the words are pronounced the same from the vowel of the main stressed syllable onwards. The list was compiled from the point of view of Received Pronunciation (with a few exceptions for General American), and may not work for other accents or dialects. Multiple-word rhymes (a phrase that rhymes with a word, known as a "phrasal" or "mosaic" rhyme), self-rhymes (adding a prefix to a word and counting it as a rhyme of itself), and identical rhymes (words that are identical in their stressed syllables, such as "bay" and "obey") are often not counted as true rhymes and have not been considered. Only the list of one-syllable words can hope to be anything near complete; for polysyllabic words, rhymes are the exception rather than the rule.
Definition of "perfect rhyme".
Following the strict definition of rhyme, a perfect rhyme demands the exact match of all sounds from the last stressed vowel to the end of the word. Therefore, words with the stress far from the end are more likely to have no perfect rhymes. For instance, a perfect rhyme for "discomulate" would have to rhyme three syllables, "-ulate." There are many words that match most of the sounds from the stressed vowel onwards and so are near rhymes, called slant rhymes. "Ovulate, copulate," and "populate," for example, vary only slightly in one consonant from "discombobulate", and thus provide very usable rhymes for most situations in which a rhyme for "discombobulate" is desired. However, no other English word has exactly these three final syllables with this stress pattern. And since in most traditions the stressed syllable should not be identical—the consonant before the stressed vowel should be different—adding a prefix to a word, as "be-elbow" for "elbow," does not create a perfect rhyme for it.
Words that rhyme in one accent or dialect may not rhyme in another. A commonplace example of this is the word "of" , which when stressed had no rhymes in British Received Pronunciation prior to the 19th century, but which rhymed with "grave" and "mauve" in some varieties of General American. In the other direction, "iron" has no rhyme in General American, but many in RP. Words may also have more than one pronunciation, one with a rhyme, and one without.
Words with obscure perfect rhymes.
This list includes rhymes of words that have been listed as rhymeless.
Non-rhyming English words.
The majority of words with antepenultimate stress, such as "ambulance", "animal, citizen, dangerous" and "obvious," and with preantepenultimate stress, such as "(un)necessary, logarithm, algorithm" and "sacrificing," have no rhyme.
Masculine rhymes.
Refractory one-syllable rhymes are uncommon; there may be fewer than a hundred in English. A great many end in a present or historical suffix "-th," or are plural or participle forms. This list includes a few polysyllabic masculine rhymes such as "obliged," which have one syllable in their rhyming part.
"pork" has no rhymes in conservative RP and GA. However, the distinction between "horse" and "hoarse" has been mostly lost in younger generations, and for them and many others "pork" which was an exception to the normal rule, now rhymes with "fork", "cork", etc. (). The OED no longer lists as an alternative pronunciation in its third edition.
Nonce words ending in "-ed" ('provided with') may produce other potentially refractory masculine rhymes. There are additional words which are only partially assimilated into English, such as Russian "kovsh" , which are refractory rhymes.
The contraction "daren't" has no known rhymes in any English dialect, however the legitimacy of contractions as a single word is disputed. Regardless of this, "daren't" lacks both perfect rhymes and phrasal rhymes.
Although not meant as a complete list, there are some additional refractory rhymes in GA. Some of these are due to RP being a non-rhotic accent, and having merged rhymes formerly distinguished by .
Feminine rhymes.
For feminine rhymes, the final two syllables must match to count as a rhyme. Once the stress shifts to the penultimate syllable, rhymeless words are quite common, perhaps even the norm: there may be more rhymeless words than words with rhymes. The following words are representative, but there are thousands of others.