Super Glossary

Eye Rhyme

Entertainment / Literature / Eye Rhyme: Rhyming words that seem to rhyme when written down as text because parts of them are spelled identically, but which are pronounced differently from each other in modern English. Examples include forth/worth, come/home, bury/fury, stove/shove, or ear/bear. There are two common origins for eye rhyme. (1) The first origin is in the Great Vowel Shift. The pronunciation of certain words has varied from century to century, and in the 1400s, English underwent radical changes in the pronunciation of vowels. Similar (though less dramatic) changes have been creeping through pronunciation in later centuries as well. For instance, in the sixteenth century, the words Rome/loom were pronounced similarly enough to create a rhyme. In older literature, what appear to be eye-rhymes to modern readers may simply be full rhymes in the original speaker's dialect. (2) A second cause brings about eye rhymes in later centuries. In these later times, as literacy grew increasingly common, and poetry was more frequently experienced visually on the page rather than aloud as an oral performance, eye rhymes became a popular technique amongst literate poets--a way of displaying one's familiarity with the written word.
Search Google for Eye Rhyme: