rhyme

Correspondence of sound, usually in the final syllable or group of syllables in lines of verse, as in ‘There was once an old man with a beard/Who said, ‘It is just as I feared.’ The rhyme depends on the vowel sounds and all the consonants except the first.

Avoided in Japanese, it is a common literary device in other Asian and European languages. Rhyme first appeared in Europe in late Latin poetry but was not used in classical Latin or Greek.

Poems of ‘fixed’ form require rhyming patterns, or the reoccurrence of sounds into schemes that are easily heard and thus identified. Many forms have predetermined rhyming patterns. The Shakespearean sonnet will use the rhyming pattern of abab cdcd efef gg, while the Petrarchan will use abba abba cdcdcd or cdecde.