Rapper Eminem, who prides himself on being able to rhyme anything, tried to rhyme the word orange on 60 Minutes. That brought to mind my own bout with poetry in college and where I could have been had Macs been around back in the day.
Poetry In Motion, Mac Style
Where was Rhyme Genie and the Mac when I needed it way back when? While in college I had one class I couldn’t avoid. Poetry. Not the study of poetry. Worse. Writing poetry. Here’s a sample of what I created:
Hold Gently This Paper Heart
Ink from a pen I seldom used
Placed long hidden thoughts on paper;
Lined sheets of white which bared my soul;
Lonely flesh, exposed by blades of word.This is my vision of the ones
Who often star in dreams, my art.
And to the eyes that peer within,
Please, hold gently this paper heart.
What did it mean? I have no idea. Not a clue. I simply put together words that sounded to me like poetry, and turned it in*. What I really needed was Rhyme Genie and a Mac.
Automatic Rhyming
Rhyme Genie is sure to make poets and rappers and lyricists roll over in their graves (even if they haven’t died). It’s a Mac app that rhymes. A rhyming dictionary on your Mac.
It’s simple to use. Enter a word to rhyme and it gets matched with over 300,000 words, over 170,000 phrases, which includes over 35,000 proper nouns. There’s a built-in Webster’s dictionary, a thesaurus with millions of synonyms, and 30 types of rhymes.
Additive Rhyme, Alliteration, Amphisbaenic Rhyme, Apocopated Rhyme, Assonance, Broken Rhyme, Consonance, Diminished Rhyme, Double Assonance, Double Consonance, Elided Rhyme, Family Rhyme, Feminine Pararhyme, Final Syllable Rhyme, First Syllable Rhyme, Full Assonance, Full Consonance, Half Double Rhyme, Homophones, Intelligent Rhyme, Light Rhyme, Metaphone, Pararhyme, Perfect Rhyme, Related Rhyme, Reverse Rhyme, Rich Rhyme, Soundex, Trailing Rhyme, Weakened Rhyme
Whoa. Those are legitimate ways to rhyme? Who knew?
It’s a huge, 200-megabyte download, but Rhyme Genie could not be easier to use. Enter a word and press enter. Rhyme Genie does the search and comes up with examples. Multiple rhymes are displayed. Multiple syllables can be turned on or off (to rhyme a specific syllable). Filter tools make it easy to find different types of rhymes for different words.
There’s a built-in Songwriter Dictionary from hundreds of thousands of song lyrics and artists. Filter through tens of thousands of parts of speech with a few clicks. My limited experience (there’s lessing rhyming requirement these days—no poetry class to worry about) with Rhyme Genie gave expected, interesting, and mixed results. Some words were easy rhymes. Others, especially when attempting to rhyme specific syllables, gave enlightened and creative results, and a few here and there were nutty. No matter what Eminem said, orange is not easy to rhyme.
It’s try-before-you-buy, so there’s not much to lose. There’s a Mac and Windows version, and the price is nominal. An iPhone and iPad version would be nice, of course.
*Got an A
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