eye rhyme
- noun
- /aɪ raɪm/
- Literature
:
rima visual
- An example of eye rhyme is the pair 'move' and 'love,' which look similar but are pronounced differently.
Examples
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In short, for many people in the second half of the century, eye rhyme was anathema.
Academic text (2017) -
But for Swinburne, the eye could be "the judge of sound," just as eye rhyme could be legitimate.
Academic text (2017) -
Poets often use eye rhyme to create interesting effects, even if the words do not sound alike.
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Many writers experiment with eye rhyme to engage readers through unexpected spelling contrasts.
How Exact
Surface Forms
Morphology
The compound is directly built from 'eye' (visual/sight) + 'rhyme' (sound correspondence), so its core meaning — a rhyme that works for the eye/appearance rather than the ear — is inferable from the constituents. Although the term is somewhat specialised in poetry, the compositional logic (a visual rather than auditory rhyme) is transparent to learners who know both words.
Etymology
The noun eye rhyme comes from the idea that the eye, or what you see, is fooled by the spelling: words look like they should rhyme on the page but do not sound the same when you say them. So, an eye rhyme means words that 'look like they rhyme' but actually do not.