William Chong

In penning their verses, the majority of songwriters and poets normally stay well away from words that have no obvious rhyme: orange, silver, and purple are prime examples. Also try rhyming the word “month”.

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I’ll let you keep thinking on those for a bit.

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While there are many perfectly acceptable ways to hold a verse or two together without the use of rhyme, it’s always been a tantalising challenge to try and do the seemingly impossible in wordplay. In his book “Words at Play“, MENSA International Journal puzzle columnist O.V. Michaelsen provides a few creative ways to rhyme some of these words:

• MONTH – rhymes perfectly with an obscure English word “grunth“. It’s an alternate spelling of the word “Granth“, the name of the sacred scriptures of the Sikh religion.
• ORANGE – “Blorenge” is the name of a 1,833-foot hill in Abergavenny, Wales.
• PURPLE – “Hirple” is a British word meaning “to limp”, while the word “curple” refers to the hindquarters and buttocks of a horse
• SILVER – “Chilver” is an old English word referring to either an ewe lamb or mutton

Of course, there are more challenging words like the above: try and think of a rhyme to go with the words ninth, pint, wolf, opus, marathon, dangerous, and discombobulate.

In the world of songwriting there’s a couple of brave folk who do give these words a decent go. The one that I can think of straight away is in the chorus of MIKA’s “Grace Kelly”, where the Lebanese-American singer exhorts:

“I can be brown, I can be blue
I can be violet sky
I can be hurtful, I can be purple
I can be anything you like
Gotta be green, gotta be mean
gotta be everything more
Why don’t you like me, why don’t you like me,
Why don’t you walk out the door?”

Granted, the rhyme works partly because he sings “hurtful” and “purple” in a high falsetto. And there’s also the fact that MIKA pronounces “hurtful” more like “hurh’ fle”… but it’s still a good effort.

Anyone know of any other songs where artists have given some of these “unrhymables” a good go?

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