No Rhyme (or Reason)

I found an interesting list somewhere last month. It was the five words that have no rhyming words in English:

• depth
• month
• orange
• silver
• purple

Whoa, I thought, I never realized that such common words can't be rhymed. I was sure that purple would rhyme with maple surple.

Or perhaps depth and month were rhymes.

But I discovered, much to my literary and poetic dismay that rhyme, true rhyme must be more than ..th deep.

Then I went Googling around the Internet and in the depths of Wikipedia I found

a list of English words without rhymes, called refractory rhymes—that is, a list of words in the English language which 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.

Lo and behold there were more

• angel
• angry
• foible
• obliged
• polka
• sandwich
• wolf
• zigzag

Then to my majestic surprise I find an obscure rhyme for purple:

rhymes with curple (the hindquarters of a horse or donkey) and hirple (to walk with a limp)

and for silver:

rhymes with chilver, a female lamb.

Finally I got into Dr. Seuss land when I discovered a rhyme for month:

rhymes with en-plus-oneth (n + 1)th, a mathematical term; also hundred-and-oneth (= hundred-and-first)

I am glad English is a living language. I can hardly wait for someone to come up with a new, but very real word that will rhyme with sandwich or, even better, foible. Think how much easier it would be to write poetry or a good rhyming song.