Nothing rhymes with orange or purple, or so I have been told (and I can’t think of anything). Are there any other English words that have no rhyming partners? And isn’t it weird that these two are both colors?
Another color – silver! Though here’s a nifty site that purports to find rhymes for all three colors.
Also, I found in my old Funk & Wagnall’s the word chilver, a provincial English term for some kinda meat.
silver you could sloppily rhyme with pilfer,
orange with door hinge,
and everybody who ever had an older brother knows that the rhyme for purple is nurple.
Well, if you’re looking for common words other than colors that don’t have strict rhymes, there’s always “month”, “carpet”, and “penguin”.
Besides, as it was once said (by Stephen Sondheim):
To find a rhyme for silver,
Or any rhymeless rhyme,
Requires only will, ver-
Bosity and time.
Yeah, and while we’re on the subject of cruddy, forced rhymes, here’s another to match silver. It’s nineteenth-century, but I forget the source:
[list]Argentum, we know,
Is the Latin for silver;
And the Latin for spring
Always was, and is still, ver.
In the words of the Roger Miller song, Dang Me:
Roses are red
And violets are purple
Sugar is sweet
and so’s maple syrple.
How about “penguin” and “sanguine”? Almost…
there’s always the name “nigel”, unless you count where the aliens on the simpsons are from, Rigel 7
and if we’re going with sloppy rhymes, you could go almost anywhere with regional accents: “water” with “outta” (Boston) etc.
I’m pretty sure there’s a star named Rigel out there.
There ARE words that rhyme with orange:
Door hinge
How many weeks are in a month?
Four, as the still moon run’eth.
Well…[with my Lung Guylund accent]
The penguin, in his new skin
The wee pet, on the carpet
The month…well, there’s kinda of a match there too, but only for use in off-colour limericks
Rigel is Beta Orionis, a B2 star which is the second-brightest star in Orion (actually usually the brightest… Alpha Ori, Betelgeuse, is variable). You can see it in the evenings this time of year, towards the south.
We’ve covered unrhymable words before, but I’m too lazy at the moment to dig up the thread.
As I’ve said before, syringe and phalange also rhyme with orange, if you include feminine rhymes.