From: Erik Hollensbe <erik@...>
Date: 2008-09-01T12:09:01+09:00
Subject: Re: How to match words that rhyme?

Michael Morin wrote:
> English is extremely inconsistent.  Good doesn't rhyme with food which
> doesn't rhyme with flood.  You're going to need something that describes
> the phonetics of each word, like an open dictionary.  With that, you
> should be able to identify which words rhyme.
> 
> Rhyme is a subjective term as well.  Some words "rhyme" even though they
> don't meet any formal definition of "rhyme," they just sound right
> together.  But this is a lesser concern.

Maybe I'm missing something subtle, but isn't this what soundex is for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundex

It's definitely not perfect; my experience has been it generally works 
better to catch misspellings in proper nouns than anything else, but it 
could be potentially useful in the first part of a multi-step filtering 
process.

At the worst, soundex is found damn near everywhere (even in some SQL 
Database implementations.. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a ruby one) 
and it should be easy to test (and rule out, if necessary) with a 
wordlist.

-Erik
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