Perfect rhyme (also called full rhyme, exact rhyme, or true rhyme) is a type of rhyme where two words or phrases have the same ending sound. This rhyme must follow two rules:
Word pairs that follow the first rule but not the second (such as "leave" and "believe") are called identities (also known as identical rhymes or identicals). Homophones, which are words with different meanings but the same pronunciation, are an example of identical rhymes.
Imperfect rhyme
Half rhyme, also known as imperfect rhyme, near-rhyme, or slant rhyme, is a type of rhyme where words have similar but not exactly the same sounds. Usually, the vowel sounds differ while the consonant sounds match, or the consonant sounds differ while the vowel sounds match. This type of rhyme is also called approximate rhyme, inexact rhyme, or off rhyme.
In the 1977 song "God Save the Queen" by the English punk rock band the Sex Pistols, the lines "God save the queen" and "the fascist regime" use a half rhyme.
The 1979 song "Up the Junction" by the English new wave band Squeeze uses half rhyme often. For example, in the opening verse:
"I never thought it would happen / With me and a girl from Clapham / Out on the windy common / That night I ain't forgotten."
Half rhyme is frequently used with assonance in rap music. It helps avoid overused rhymes (like pairing "knowledge" with "college") and allows writers more freedom when creating lines. Some words in English have no perfect rhymes, so slant rhyme is needed. Half rhyme can also help create longer rhymes with multiple syllables.
In the song "N.Y. State of Mind" by rapper Nas, the lines "And be prosperous, though we live dangerous / Cops could just arrest me, blamin' us, we're held like hostages" use half rhyme in a complex pattern.
The children's nursery rhyme "This Little Piggy" includes a slant rhyme between "home" and "none." This rhyme was common in Early Modern English and still occurs in some Northern English dialects. The lines are:
"This little piggy stayed (at) home… this little piggy had none."
In the song "Dead Quote Olympics" by The Hives, the singer Howlin' Pelle Almqvist uses a slant rhyme between "idea" and "library":
"This time you really got something, it's such a clever idea / But it doesn't mean it's good because you found it at the libra-ri-a."