Someone who's a lot more wired than I am will be able to say how much of this is currently possible, but it seems to me that with the OED available on disc one should be able to generate rhymes ad hoc, allowing of course for the vagaries of English spelling (the machine won't know, for example, that "love" and "move" no longer rhyme). It ought to be possible to do searches for rhymes on any number of syllables, or to find rhymes with only Polish roots, or rhyming words that entered the language between 1350 and 1500, or whatever. It might require extra software, and the person who writes it stands to make, oh, tens of dollars from eager formalist poets. It would sure be fun to explore.
My favorite etymological dictionary is Joseph Shipley's "The Origins of English Words." It's a tad awkward to use at first, but Shipley published the thing when he was in his nineties, culminating a lifetime of philology, and every entry has fascinating, surprising digressions revealing unsuspected relationships between seemingly disparate words. "Awkward," for example, turns out to be from the Anglo-Saxon for left-handed and therefore yet another slur (along with "sinister" and "gauch") on us southpaws.
RPW
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