Rhyme Terms: Slant Rhyme

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As noted last month, I’m sharing a series of blog posts focused on rhyme terms and rhyme schemes. Today, we’ll take a closer look at slant rhyme.
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Slant Rhyme, also known as near rhyme, imperfect rhyme, and (believe it or not!) lazy rhyme includes “words with any type of sound similarity, from close to fairly remote” according to Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry by Laurence Perrine and Thomas R. Arp.  

​Frequently slant rhyme includes the final words of lines which do not rhyme perfectly but share a common vowel sound or consonant sound that lingers when the words are read aloud.  Examples of this type of slant rhyme include: alone / home; time / mind; clean / gleam; face / shapes; town / around.
 
Let’s take a look at some examples of slant rhyme in both a poem and a picture book. Then read to the end to find our more about "why" writers might use slant rhyme.

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Hey There, Stink Bug! written by Leslie Bulion and illustrated by Leslie Evans is a delightful collection of buggy poems, chock full of fun facts, scientific terms, poetry forms, and resources for young readers.
The poem, "Thanklessness" employs slant rhyme in each of its five stanzas in lines three and four. The poem is designed with four line stanzas (quatrains) following an AABB rhyme scheme, meaning that lines 1 & 2 have end rhymes, as well as lines 3 & 4. The final word of each stanza is "injury" which is a bit challenging for a perfect rhyme (as we learned about last month), so slant rhyme is a great choice to make these words really sing and add an element of FUN! Read for yourself below and find these pairs of slant rhyme: stingerly / injury; custody / injury; anatomy / injury; hospitality / injury; and dignity / injury. 

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Another example of slant rhyme is found in the pages of the charming ABC book, LMNO peas by author-illustrator Keith Baker.

This classic picture book always makes me chuckle as page after page, the peas try on all sorts of different occupations in the sweet illustrations.

Check out the slant rhyme for this spread where "givers and takers" is a near rhyme to the five-syllable "investigators."
We're gardeners, gigglers, givers and takers.
We're hikers, inventors, and investigators.

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One conclusion we can draw from these examples above--slant rhyme comes in handy when you are working with multi-syllable words and cannot find a perfect rhyme that works. Slant rhyme can also be used to surprise your reader, offering an unexpected twist at the end of a stanza! How do you plan to use this technique?

Thanks for hanging out with me to learn a bit more about slant rhyme. Now search for it in your favorite rhyming picture books and poems!
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--Eileen Meyer, Rhyme Doctor
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