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Perfect and imperfect rhymes

rhyme which satisfies certain conditions on the phonemes of the words involved

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJun 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ7168094
Source-derived summary

Perfect rhyme (also called full rhyme, exact rhyme, or true rhyme) is a form of rhyme between two words or phrases, satisfying the following conditions:

The stressed vowel sound in both words must be identical, as well as any subsequent sounds. For example, the words kit and bit form a perfect rhyme, as do spaghetti and already in American accents.

The onset of the stressed syllable in the words must differ. For example, pot and hot are a perfect rhyme, while leave and believe are not.

Word pairs that satisfy the first condition but not the second (such as the aforementioned leave and believe) are technically identities (also known as identical rhymes or identicals). Homophones, being words of different meaning but identical pronunciation, are an example of identical rhyme.

Imperfect rhyme

Half rhyme or imperfect rhyme, sometimes called bastard rhyme, near-rhyme, lazy rhyme, or slant rhyme, is a type of rhyme formed by words with similar but not identical sounds. In most instances, the vowel segments are different and the consonants are identical or vice versa. This type of rhyme is also called approximate rhyme, inexact rhyme, imperfect rhyme (in contrast to perfect rhyme), off rhyme, analyzed rhyme, suspended rhyme, or sprung rhyme.

Use in popular music

Rock and punk

In the 1977 song "God Save the Queen" by the English punk rock band the Sex Pistols, the authors create a rhyme with the lines "God save the queen" and "the fascist regime".

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Perfect and imperfect rhymes” is rhyme which satisfies certain conditions on the phonemes of the words involved. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Perfect, imperfect and rhymes, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1977—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Perfect, imperfect and rhymes is the immediate research focus.
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The phrase “rhyme which satisfies certain conditions on the phonemes of the words involved” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7168094. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1977.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Perfect and imperfect rhymes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.