Back in 2012, my friend Alex Muravyov and I built a toy called Rhyme Buster — a rap lyrics generator that mashes together rhyming lines from real songs into new verses. You pick a genre (hip-hop, Shakespeare sonnets, or nursery rhymes), hit generate, and it stitches together lines that rhyme with each other. The results are usually hilarious and occasionally accidentally brilliant.
The engine searches a database of real song lyrics and finds lines whose last words rhyme, then combines them into couplets. You can edit individual lines, regenerate the ones you don’t like, and copy the whole thing when you’re done. It’s surprisingly addictive.
We also built a rhyming dictionary with over 130,000 word pairs, a word definition lookup, a thesaurus, a Scrabble word finder, and even a database of over 1,000 nursery rhymes with full lyrics. The syllable counter is probably the most practically useful tool — it breaks any word into syllables, which is handy for writing haiku or matching meter in poetry.
The whole thing runs on PHP, MySQL, and SphinxSearch. The rhyme matching uses phonetic analysis from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, and the quality ranking is refined by community votes. It’s one of those side projects where we kept adding features until it turned into a full suite of word tools.
If you write lyrics, poetry, or even just play Scrabble, give rhymebuster.com a try.