Rhymes with "orange"

Grant Barrett gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG
Mon May 1 14:38:18 UTC 2006


Most of those "nothing rhymes with" chestnuts are easily answered
because the queries are poorly phrased. Maybe taking advantage of
poor phrasing seems like a loophole that defeats the spirit of the
questions, but I think that when puzzles or challenges are presented--
when someone is pitting their factoid knowledge against yours--then
loopholes are just begging to be exploited. For example:

Rhyming with "chamber" is easily done because the question is rarely
posed in such as a way as to forbid words that include "chamber" in
their makeup. These are a few unhyphenated words that rhyme (and
there are many more hyphenated or compound forms that do, too):

antechamber
antichamber (variant of above)
bedchamber
inchamber
outchamber

Orange has several rhymes, as long as you are content with rhyming
only the final syllable. In my idiolect of American English, the
following can rhyme with "orange," depending on how careful my speech
is, since the central schwa tends to vanish in "orange." I tend to
pronounce it as or-RUNJ or "ornj."

citrange
grunge
muskellunge
scavenge

"Syringe" doesn't rhyme for me: sir-RINJ or suh-RINJ.

For silver, there's "quicksilver" at the very least.

A wildcard search of OED online is quite useful in coming up with
these sorts of answers, particularly since the queries usually don't
specify non-archaic, non-obsolete words (another loophole).

Grant Barrett
gbarrett at worldnewyork.org
http://www.doubletongued.org/


On May 1, 2006, at 08:41, Landau, James wrote:

> Does anyone have an English rhyme for "chamber"?  Or do we add it
> to the
> notorious list of "orange", "silver", and "month" as words with no
> rhymes in English.
>
> By the way, a friend of mine, currently in Singapore with the World
> Bank, confirms that "orange" and "syringe" rhyme in Singlish.
>
>     - Jim Landau
>
> "White people have no souls" - Baron Munchausen
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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