Just because a rhyming dictionary lists them doesn't mean they are actual rhymes. Rhyming dictionaries contain many non-rhymes, I'm afraid. Are there really people who think orange and impinge are a perfect rhyme? It's certainly not a rhyme in the US, I assure you.

Thanks, David.

Ah, Jerome - yes (though I did mention it higher up the thread), Blorenge will do.

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

The fortuitous rhyme is mentioned towards the end of the entry, if anyone can be bothered to read that far.

Now, in return for that vital piece of information, who can tell me how to pronounce the surname of Mr Willard Espy? I do, of course, have a reason for asking.

That's all very well, Jayne, but they're only giving rhymes for the last syllable, which is no use, since they're all stressed, whereas the last syllable of "orange" is unstressed.

And besides, where's "minge"?

You're quite right, Brian, but I was merely pointing out that you do find those so-called 'rhymes' for orange in a rhyming dictionary.

They're MUCH too polite to include 'minge', Brian! Funny, that, because I just checked out the rhymes for 'luck' and 'blunt' and they're not so coy on those pages.

Jayne

Rhyme Time (or should that be Rhyme Tome?)
 

When I was teaching in the prison we once had a big discussion about rhyming dictionaries: some of the men thought it was 'cheating' to use one, and it would instantly turn anyone into a poet. As if!!

I took my rhyming dictionary to work
(Creative Writing classes in a jail).
A smart-arsed inmate called out with a smirk:
“Huh - what’s the point of that? Who couldn’t fail
to write a poem? Even I could do it
with one of those,” he sneered. “It’s just a tool
to help you do a job,” I said. I knew it
involved much more; he took me for a fool
so I went on: “I couldn’t fix a clutch
or change a cam-belt, even with some spanners;
would all the proper socket sets and such
make me a good mechanic? Mind your manners!
Please – open it and write a poem, then.”
He set to work and later, with a grin,
read out his ‘masterpiece’. The other men
laughed too. “I know it’s rubbish, Miss. You win!”

I need to look up 'minge.'

That's the thing about rhyming dictionaries. They often include words based on whether they have qualifying letter combinations, regardless of pronunciation, and so are overinclusive. They also (less often) omit possibilities that you can think of on your own. For me they are often quite useful, but only as a spur to one's own thinking, and as a convenient way of looking at a list of possibilities, and not as an arbiter of whether something rhymes.

The word 'orange' is one I'd avoid in any event, since there's a wide range of regional ways that people pronounce it (e.g., one syllable or two), and I have a general preference for avoiding words that will require the reader to back up and regroup after figuring out how I intended them to be said.

Ha! We posted simultaneously, Bob.

As my poem says, a rhyming dictionary is only a tool that is sometimes useful - and nothing more.

'Minge' means er... a woman's genitals or pubic hair.

Jayne

Bob wondered, “What’s a minge?”
The answer made him cringe,
But gamely undeterred,
He tried another word.
“Can someone tell me what
Exactly is a twat?”
You’d think he’d had enough -
The next one will be “muff”.

I'm reasonably certain that the name is stressed on the first syllable, and that the second is pronounced P, not pi.

Thank you, Chris. I feared as much. It's such an established word in British English that it's hard to have to give up all those easy rhymes.

Good Lord. We used to say something was mingy if it was insufficient as in mingy breakfast. And then of curse there's minging, isn't there?

John, I don't think there's a connection between "minge" and "mingy". Have no fear, I'm sure that your breakfasts, however insubstantial, would not have been organic.

On First Looking Into A Rhyming Dictionary

This could make my ho-hum verse sound very
good. I'd be as good as Jayne or Mary.
Think! My poems would be legendary!

I used to drop a word like a canary
down the shaft-black mind. A visionary
end-rhyme sometimes echoed, sometimes—not.

Now I can scan these pages in my airy
sunlit room. But I will miss the wary
wait, the thrilled recall of words forgot.

Coming in rather late on this one, I recall a London department store called Gorringes.

Are you sure you don't mean Gammage's, Bazza?

Nope. Gorringes. Buckingham Palace Road. Closed at the end of the sixties. Gamages was in Holborn and lasted till the seventies. Just.

Gamages had a model railway. I went up to London to see it when I was about eight.

Yes, Ann, pace Adrian Fry I remember both, but more particularly Gamages as a kid, since my mother had an account there & we'd pay a visit when we went up to London. Nearby, I think on the other side of High Holborn, was Ellisdon's the joke & magic shop.

Being too young and not located in London, I only knew of Gamages from frequent references to it by Robert Robinson on his much missed 1980s radio discussion programme Stop the Week and in his memoirs. Goringe's passed me by.

Ok, they need to set up a contest about Gamages and Gorringes, just to put the rhyme-masters to the test. Compare and contrast, 16 lines or fewer, must rhyme and scan.

Well I ought to be shit-hot at that as of this lunchtime. The postman brought me my "Words to Rhyme With" all the way from Texas. It's a huge hardback and I've only dipped in but am horrified to discover that there are no words in it so far as I can see, just phonetic approximations. I've been sitting here biting my lip going duh-dah-dinge and being worse at working out what's on the page that I ever was with actual reading. There's words at the dictionary level but when it comes to the rhyming list they're all in a sort of dooh-dah order. No wonder it was discarded from Kendallville library!

I expect I shall get used to it. It was hardly an expensive experiment. It only cost me a dollar 26 and considering the vast weight of the thing the shipping was peanuts.

But I still don't think hasbeen rhymes with Bedouin, Mr E.

Ann, surely you must have known that they don't have words in Texas, just phonetic approximations.