Home › Glossary › Letter R

Reverse Rhyme

Rhyme
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A kind of near rhyme where the final consonant sounds are the same, but the initial consonant sounds are different

Detailed Definition
Reverse Rhyme (also known as pararhyme or half-rhyme) is a sonic device where words share initial and medial consonants but differ in their vowels—such as “spin” and “span” or “toll” and “tell”—creating a subtle, dissonant echo that suggests connection without full harmonic resolution; favored by modernist poets like Wilfred Owen to convey psychological unease or fractured reality, reverse rhyme disrupts the comfort of perfect rhyme while maintaining enough sonic linkage to sustain cohesion, thereby producing tension between expectation and fulfillment that mirrors thematic instability.
Example
Example in poetry:
Reverse Rhyme: rhyming initial consonants instead of endings—“cat” and “cap” (alliteration as rhyme); In Old English, “beorn” and “bregd” share onset; A modern poem: “Star / stay / still” uses reverse rhyme for incantation; Also called “head rhyme” or “alliterative rhyme”; Common in oral and Celtic traditions.
Additional Notes
Reverse Rhyme places rhyming sounds at line beginnings rather than endings. Also called head rhyme or initial rhyme. Related to alliteration but requires full syllable matching. Creates forward momentum rather than closure.
Also Known As
Backward rhyme Reversed echo End-to-beginning sound Inverted correspondence inverted rhyme Contra-rime
Skip to main content