(P/B) PENGUIN RHYMING DICTIONARY - ROSALIND FERGUSON

Milton, in his preface to Paradise Lost, complained of the 'troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming? the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter and lame metre'. Yet many creators of superb matter and lilting metre, both before and since 1668 (when these words were written), have felt it necessary to make their verses rhyme. Some poets have relied on their heads to satisfy this need, others have resorted to rhyming dictionaries. Walker's Rhyming Dictionary, for example, has been in continuous publication for 150 years. According to its preface, it has 'been a friend in need to generations of poets and rhymesters from Byron downwards'. But when John Walker, a retired schoolmaster, compiled his Rhyming Dictionary in 1775, he had to do so without the benefit of a computer. Had he had access to modern technology, the main part of his Rhyming Dictionary, in which the words are listed in reverse alphabetical order (working from the last letter of each word back to the first), would have been relatively simple to produce from the headword list of any standard dictionary. However, this list alone does not provide the poet seeking a rhyme for, say, trite, with any of the perfect rhymes: sight, indict, Fahrenheit, acolyte or apartheid. On the other hand, it throws together as if they rhymed those classic examples of English spelling inconsistency: bough, cough, though, rough and through. To compile the Penguin Rhyming Dictionary, a list of words together with their phonetic transcriptions was extracted from a standard dictionary data base. The computer was programmed to sort these words, working from the end of the phonetic transcription back to the beginning, into phonetic order. Unsuitable and unrhymable words were then discarded and the remainder of the list was sorted into rhyming groups. The result it that homophones (phonetically identical words of different meaning), such as sight, cite and site, are now grouped together, and such rhymes as stipulation and manipulation, rather than being buried in an alphabetical list of -ation words, appear side by side. With its ability to scan through a complete list of phonetic transcriptions in a matter of minutes, the computer is an incomparably more versatile rhymester than the live poet with his dying brain cells and deteriorating memory. This dictionary offers to the poet the fruits of the computer's labour, providing him or her with all the words that one would expect to find in a standard English dictionary, including a selection of proper names. There is only one condition of entry for a word: that there should be at least one other word that rhymes with it. Because poetry is not only a question of rhymes - and because poets may wish to know what their verses mean -a short gloss is provided for the more obscure words. (from the publisher)