Eye rhyme

An eye rhyme, also called a visual rhyme or a sight rhyme, is a rhyme in which two words are spelled similarly but pronounced differently.[1] An example is the name of English actor Sean Bean, whose name based on its visual aspect looks like it should be pronounced "Seen Bean", but when spoken, there is no rhyming quality; its pronunciation is "Shawn Bean".

Many older English poems, particularly those written in Early Modern and Middle English, contain rhymes that were originally true or full rhymes, but as read by modern readers, they are now eye rhymes because of shifts in pronunciation, especially the Great Vowel Shift. These are called historic rhymes. Historic rhymes are used by linguists to reconstruct pronunciations of old languages, and are used particularly extensively in the reconstruction of Old Chinese, whose writing system does not allude directly to pronunciation.

Example

One example of a historic rhyme (i.e., one that was a true rhyme but is now an eye rhyme) is the following:

The great man down, you mark his favourite flies;
The poor advanced makes friends of enemies.

— Player King, in William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act III, scene II

When Hamlet was written around 1600, "flies" and "enemies" rhymed in local dialects, but as a result of the shifts in pronunciation since then, the original rhyme has been lost.

gollark: Yes it is. Programming is art when it's potatOS.
gollark: And yet they don't have usable keybords for writing things, sufficiently large screens to do video editing and such without æ, OSes which are designed to allow data sharing between apps for purposes, a sufficiently non-locked-down system for basically any sort of scripting/programming outside of somewhat isolated environments, etc.
gollark: I only do it in emergencies or when heavpoot asks for OIR:EM or something because it's quite irritating.
gollark: Phones are not designed for content creation.
gollark: The solution is of course to replace my calculator's innards with some sort of high end microcontroller with a 2G modem, relabel the buttons, and install SSH on it.

See also

References
  1. "Rhyme". Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (6th (2011): 1. MAS Ultra – School ed.). 2012. p. 23.


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