miceda

The other night my daughter was telling me about some interesting facts she read in one of her school books. One fact in particular caught my interest:

Orange and Silver are the only two words in the (American)English language that do not ryhme with any other word

My first thought was “How the hell did they figure this out? Did someone go through the entire dictionary and test each word?” Then I thought, “you can probably automate this task with software; but how? What makes two words rhyme?” To me, a rhyme is when two words sound the same. But maybe there is an obscure rule in Grammar I can use to programmatically test a set of words to see if they rhyme?

A Google search turned up this information on using phonetics to detect rhyme The blog talks about using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to translate words into their phonetic equivalent and then inspecting the words for a match. Check out this example

Aha! I’m getting close. Now if I could just capture the IPA in code and use it to translate words on the fly I’d have the next killa app. However, there’s just one problem. After grabbing the IPA chart it was obvious the translation is based on how something sounds. Even for a human it appears extremely difficult considering accent, dialect, and other factors.

So it seems ( at least right now ) it’d be nearly impossible to write software to detect rhyme.