resources - How does one find a word with a rhyming middle syllable?


In conversation today I wanted to find a set of words that have an "or" sound in their middles, as in "torrent" and "sorcerer".


I couldn't find one. Most rhyming dictionaries I found only concerned themselves with the last syllable.


I think that part of the problem is that I'm not aware of the correct term for what I'm looking for. "Rhyme" almost always means the final syllable, not anything in the middle of the word. Thus, I'm hoping English.SE can help.


Is there a term for words which share a common middle syllable? Do you know of any sources that contain sets of such words?



Answer



Here are a few ways you can find it, depending on what you want.


Your two examples are words where the "OR" sound occurs as the primary stressed vowel sound of the word. I'm not sure if that's important to you or not. For example, abHOR and abNORmal have the "OR" sound where the word has primary stress. Acorn, AIRforce, and deporTEE do not.


Here are a few approaches you can take to find words that contain the "or" sound.


Approach A: Search for the phonetic pattern in Ben Briedis' Phonetic Word Search


Navigate to http://www.benbriedis.com/phonetic/search.php and search for the phonetic pattern you want to find.


If you DO care about stress, search for:


.+ AO1 R .+

If you DO NOT care about stress, search for:


.+ AO R .+

The ".+" part of the pattern matches any 1 or more phonemes. This helps ensure that the "OR" is sandwiched between other phonemes, and doesn't only appear at the front or end of the word. If you want to match any occurrence, use ".*" instead of ".+".


This is a great tool if you want to search phonetic patterns ad-hoc.


Approach B: Search for the word in Dillfrog Muse


(Full disclosure: I'm the author of this tool)


Use the Dillfrog Muse "Contains (sound)" search to finds words that contain the phonemes of "or", ignoring stress.


This does not eliminate words that start or end with "or" though.


Approach C: Search Raw Pronunciation Data using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary


The most flexible option, but also the most bare-metal.


If you're feeling a bit hardcore with a text editor, download the latest CMU Pronouncing Dictionary file. (Sorry, I'd link it, but I don't have enough reputation to post more than 2 links.) At the time of writing, you want to download the file named "cmudict-0.7b". Search that text using your favorite tool that has regex support (such as Notepad++ or egrep). This file lists the pronunciations of words, 1 word per line.


Using the ARPABET, "or"'s pronunciation looks like "AO1 R". So you can search for any other lines that contain "AO1 R" and you'll see words that have the "or" sound where that vowel sound has the primary stress.


If you don't care about stress, use a regex to match any number instead of the 1. For example, search for a regex of:


AO[0-9] R

Again, this does not eliminate words that start or end with "or" though.


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