rhyme or reason
9
6.6
- idiom
- Informal
:
sin razón ni lógica
- There seems to be no rhyme or reason for the way he behaves lately.
- little rhyme or reason
- apparent rhyme or reason
- really no rhyme or reason
And there's never any sort of like rhyme or reason laid out for them.
- And there's never any sort of like rhyme or reason laid out for them.
- If I say absence of field, meaning no rhyme or reason, just nonsense.
- As I said, there is not much rhyme or reason to this.
- But is there really any rhyme or reason to these claims or is it just a bunch of crap?
- From my perspective, for me at least, there really is no rhyme or reason why I survived and others didn't.
- And the characters didn't have specific point of views and they were just in these scenarios and scenes with no rhyme or reason.
- I broke stuff that there was no rhyme or reason.
Examples
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There's no rhyme or reason to it, and there's certainly no secret.
Blog text (23) -
There's no rhyme or reason to this life.
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Whatever this is, it's coming and going for no rhyme or reason.
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You had no rhyme or reason for what you did to me.
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The more I think about things, the more I see no rhyme or reason in life.
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There seems to be no rhyme or reason to it.
Blog text (28) -
There really was no rhyme or reason to the placement of the games.
Blog text (21) -
There is no rhyme or reason to your set of beliefs.
Blog text (5) -
There's no rhyme or reason to this game.
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But there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason.
Blog text (26)
Synonyms
1
6.8
In a random way with no clear reason
1
6.5
In a way that is not logical or clear
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning ('no logical explanation') is partially inferable from the constituents: 'rhyme' can be understood metaphorically as pattern/regularity and 'reason' as explanation, so a learner could guess 'no pattern or explanation.' However, the phrase is a conventionalized idiom and the pairing is somewhat metaphorical and lexicalized, so the exact idiomatic force may not be fully predictable without prior exposure.
Etymology
The phrase rhyme or reason comes from the idea that good speech or writing should have both rhyme, a regular sound pattern, and reason, clear sense. If something has neither, people said it had 'no rhyme or reason', so today the phrase means 'no clear explanation'.