How Rhymes Can Improve Your Pronunciation

You did it! You finally mastered the pronunciation for a really difficult English word, like wool or choir or the dreaded rural.

Why stop with just one word? If you look up words that rhyme with your newly conquered one, you can grow your pronunciation skills that much faster! For example, rural rhymes with plural and neural. Choir rhymes with buyer, flyer, wire and many more.

It's true: sometimes what makes a word difficult to pronounce is specific to its particular combination of sounds, like the two /r/ sounds in rural. When that's the case, it can be helpful to start with an easier rhyming word, like neural, and then work your way up to rural, because at least you've got everything down pat except the initial sound. 

​My favorite rhyming dictionary is Rhymezone. It is very comprehensive. Rhymezone highlights a word's most common rhymes, as well as offers rhymes with multiples syllables and homophones (words that are spelled differently but sound the same, like way and weigh.) You can also look up a word in lyrics, poetry and quotes to get a feel for it in context. Rhymezone is great for writers, too. When I was working as a copywriter, I used the site all the time.

Here is a screenshot of Rhymezone's results for choir. And that's just the two-syllable matches! There are many more further down the page. So here's my advice: Want to improve your pronunciation? Make time for rhymes!

Rhymezone.com