Home › Glossary › Letter S

Scrambled 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 rhyme created by anagrammatic rearrangement of a word’s letters, producing a phonetically similar but orthographically distinct match.

Detailed Definition
Scrambled rhyme is a playful or experimental technique where expected rhyming words are replaced with phonetically similar but semantically jarring or nonsensical pairs, disrupting coherence for comic, surreal, or critical effect; it challenges conventional aesthetics while highlighting the arbitrary nature of linguistic sound-symbol relationships.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Lewis Carroll’s "Jabberwocky," rhymes like “slithy” and “mimsy” create scrambled rhyme through invented words; E.E. Cummings often scrambles rhyme schemes, as in “anyone lived in a pretty how town” with irregular internal echoes; Gertrude Stein’s “Sacred Emily” uses phonetic near-rhymes like “rose” and “lose” in disordered patterns; Christian Bök’s "Eunoia" Chapter A uses constrained vowels to produce scrambled, rule-based rhymes
Additional Notes
Scrambled rhyme is a rare term that may refer to a random or disorganized rhyme scheme, or to an eye rhyme or near rhyme where the spelling is intentionally scrambled to achieve a sonic effect; not a standard rhyming convention.
Also Known As
Mixed rhyme jumbled rhyme scrambled sound pair Anagram rhyme
Skip to main content