half-rhyme

In verse, a rhyme in which the consonant sounds are similar but not the vowel sounds. For example, in her poem The Soul Selects, the US poet Emily Dickinson (a poet who made extensive use of half-rhyme) rhymes gate and mat, one and stone.

In a more emphatic form of half-rhyme, two consonant sounds are similar:

frowned and friend, hall and hell.

Half-rhymes allow a poet a more subtle range of rhyming effects, especially when combined with other rhyming schemes, and help to avoid the sing-song chiming of full rhymes. Moreover, half-rhymes can introduce a slight note of discord (a lack of complete harmony), an effect that has been subtly exploited by many 20th-century poets.

Though a familiar feature of several literary traditions (notably the Irish, Welsh, and Icelandic), half-rhymes were not widely used in English-language verse until the second half of the 19th century, when they were effectively exploited by Emily Dickinson in the USA and Gerard Manley Hopkins in Britain. Other poets noted for their skilful use of half-rhymes include W B Yeats, Wilfred Owen, W H Auden, and Dylan Thomas.

The earliest English writer to employ half-rhymes systematically was the 17th-century poet Henry Vaughan, though his experiments were not taken up by others.