Rhyme
/raɪm/noun
Matching sound at the ends of words, especially at the ends of lines of verse.
The Greek roots
Literally: “measured flow”
The story of the word
Middle English had rime, and where it came from is still argued. The usual account runs Old French rime back to Latin rhythmus and so to Greek rhythmós, though some scholars route it instead through Frankish rīm, meaning number or series, and others suspect the two words merged. What is not in doubt is the spelling: seventeenth-century writers pushed in the h and the y to make the Greek pedigree visible, and rhythm, borrowed separately, is the same word taken straight.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 13th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
In a sentence
He needed a rhyme for orange and gave up on the whole verse.
The song works because the rhyme lands a beat later than you expect.