ABSTRACT
English is less rich in rhymes than many other languages. Amore in Italian rhymes with cuore, but love in English perfectly only with the undignified word shove or the trivial word glove. Rhymes like pretty and witty, roses and poses, are called feminine rhymes: rhymes like niminy, piminy, prettily, wittily, rosily, cosily, are called triple rhymes, and their use is generally confined to light or comic verse. Geoffrey N. Leech in A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, has tabulated possible kinds of rhyme thus. His formula for a rhyme is Consonant-Vowel-Consonant, but he points out that there may be from none up to three consonants before the vowel, and from none up to four consonants after it. Pararhyme is like rime riche with the consonants the same, but the interior vowel changes. Rhymes of more than three syllables, like visibility, risibility, can be found or invented but their use is confined to very broadly comic, sometimes music-hall or patter verse.
