Customer Reviews

Walker's Rhyming Dictionary of the English Language

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This rhyming dictionary is a closer to a proper dictionarythan than a thesaurus of rhymes. The entire contents arealphabetized from the last letter to the first. Not 'z' to 'a', but so 'glow' and 'slow' would appear next to each other. As such, this is probably the only rhyming dictionary around that is better for sight rhymes than phonetic ones. It's real value comes from not caring about rhymes at all, but instead looking for words with similar suffixes, eg all the -ism's, or when you don't remember the first letter(s), such as perhaps 'pneumatic'.

This is a very thorough rhyming dictionary. It is a list of words alphabetized starting from the back of the word. These words then have a definition. (In cases where the ending on the word is pronounced differently than the same ending on neighboring words this is pointed out in the definition.) The main advantage to this dictionary is that it has a more extensive list of words than other rhyming dictionaries I have come across.

I have an old edition of this. (It doesn't say when it was printed but I'm thinking sometime in the 40's or 50's. From the introduction I believe that this is a reprint of the 1851 edition, so that explains some of the oddities.) The problem that I found in using this edition is that many of the words in the older edition are very unusual or are outdated. Just to pick a random word from a random page: seiatherical - belonging to a sun dial. And another: Shough - a shaggy dog. I am assuming that the revised edition removes many of these oddities.

This revised edition is probably more useful than older editions. On the other hand older editions start at 4$ for a used copy. So you are paying 10 times as much for the revision. You will have to pick through a lot of anachronisms to use an older copy. You may like this if you are into language history or you may beat your head against the wall.

incredible variety and includes the simplicities most authors leave out that makes a work accessible to all levels, however the strict alphabetical organization does leave some ryhming to a longer search, most notable collection of ryhmes though