Ending Sound, Explained

Every word ends in a string of sounds. “Party” ends P·AH·R·T·EE. The filter gives you one box for each of those sounds, counting back from the end: last sound, 2nd last, 3rd last and so on. Fill a box and only words with that sound in that position stay on the page. Leave a box empty and it doesn’t matter what sits there.

Because you can fill any box in any combination, you are not stuck with the way a rhyme type happens to slice a word. You can keep the whole ending, or keep just the very last sound and a sound three places back, or anything in between.

Search a word, then press the funnel button next to Arrange. The Ending sound panel sits under the word filters. Your word’s sounds are written out above a row of boxes, with a bracket round each syllable so you can see where one ends and the next begins.

Click a box and a small window lists every sound that turns up in that position among your results, with the number of words for each. Click a sound to keep it. A small dot marks the sound your own word has in that spot. Once a sound is chosen its box fills in; click the box to change it, click the chosen sound again to clear it, or use Clear sounds to start over.

You get one box for each sound in your word, never fewer than five and never more than ten, so a long word like “dangerous” can be matched a long way back from the end.

Some consonants are made almost the same way in the mouth, so the ear forgives one standing in for another. We call them cousins: T and D, P and B, K and G, F and V, S and Z, SH and ZH, TH and DH, CH and J, and the three nasal sounds M, N and NG. Swap one for its cousin and the line still lands, with a little more colour than a perfect rhyme.

Example: party

A perfect rhyme for “party” needs the T, which gives you words like hearty and arty. Set the last sound to EE and the 2nd last to D, the cousin of T, and a whole new family opens up:

Example: meaning

Keep the “-ing” ending (last sound NG, 2nd last IH) and choose which consonant sits in front of it. With N you get the perfect rhymes:

With M, the cousin of N, you get the close-but-different ones:

The more of the ending you match, the closer the words sound to yours, and the shorter the list gets. Try it with “dangerous” (D·EY·N·JH·ER·AH·S):

• Last sound S5,558 words
• …and 2nd last AH1,171 words
• …and 3rd last ER54 words

That last 54 is the “-erous” family: generous, numerous, murderous, humorous, barbarous, boisterous. Searching “night” and setting the 3rd-last sound to N does the same job on a short word, narrowing the perfect rhymes to the “-nite” ones: ignite, tonight, midnight, overnight, reunite.

The window has a Select / Exclude switch. In Select you choose the one sound you want. Flip to Exclude and every click rules a sound out instead, as many as you like, so you can strip out a family of words without having to name what you do want. The box then turns hatched and shows a “not equal” sign. Click a ruled-out sound again to bring it back.

It is handy for tidying a long list: exclude S and Z in the last box to drop words that end that way, such as plurals, or exclude the one sound you keep seeing in a spot to hear what else is out there.

The filter works on top of everything else. The rhyme types still group the results, and the other filters (word type, syllables, stress and the rest) all combine with it, so you can ask for, say, two-syllable nouns that end in a cousin sound.

The sounds are American English, the same pronouncing dictionary the rest of RimeTime uses, so they follow how a word is said rather than how it is spelled. That is why “knight” and “night” match, and why the sound boxes show EE, EYE and OH instead of letters.