English Rhyming Dictionary
This program outputs all the known perfect rhymes for the given word(s). The
results are normally filtered according to a list of valid English words (see
"WORD LIST" below) and then displayed to the user, grouped by the number of
rhyming syllables (the "order" of the rhyming word).
RHYMING DICTIONARY
This program uses the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary
(called the "CMU dictionary"). This dictionary (UTF-8 encoded) is included in
the data directory.
WORD LIST
The CMU dictionary includes words not commonly present in daily speech. To
rectify this, a list of valid words can be given. Only resulting rhymes
present in this word list (called a "dictionary" by the program) are
displayed. Additionally, words starting with an upper-case letter (usually
proper nouns) can be omitted via -n,--no-capital.
Words present in this dictionary are displayed using the same capitalization
as they have in the file. Therefore, with -a,--all, upper-case words in the
output aren't present in the word list.
If no word list is given, then everything from the CMU dictionary is included
in the output and all words will be upper-case.
PERFECT/IMPERFECT RHYMES
By default, only perfect rhymes are displayed. Passing -R,--remove-stresses
removes lexical stress notation and, in turn, adds imperfect rhymes to the
output.
In this specific program, I'm using the term "imperfect rhymes" to refer to
words that share the same rhyming syllables but differ in lexical stress. For
example, "BRIDGE" and "CARTRIDGE" rhyme but differ in which syllable is
stressed.
REFERENCES
This CMU dictionary was obtained via the Carnegie Mellon University website:
http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict
and retrieved on the 7th of September 2020.
This code was loosely inspired by the node-rhyme (version 0.0.3) module by
James Halliday (http://substack.net)
https://github.com/substack/node-rhyme
None of their code is included in this final program.