Rhyme Pairs

Twelve four-letter words are laid on the board and exactly six of them rhyme with exactly six others. A rhyme here is the plain, checkable kind: two words rhyme when their last two letters are the same, so band goes with bend and folk goes with talk. The trap is the board itself — it is built so that most of the endings share one letter and only one. Band and bank look like a pair and are not. Wolf, golf, help and pulp all carry an l in the same place and make two pairs, not one lump. Read only the final letter and you will be wrong most of the time, which is the whole lesson in one sentence.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is outlined.
2. Move between the words with the arrow keys or WASD. The cursor steps over pairs you have already crossed off, so it only ever rests on a word still in play.
3. Hold a word with Enter or Space — or just tap it. The tile splits open to show its ending, and the line under the board tells you which ending to hunt for.
4. Press its partner. If the last two letters match, both tiles cross off with a ✓ and the shared ending is named. If they do not, both tiles show a ✕ with their two endings written out side by side, so you can see exactly where they part company.
5. Changed your mind? Press the held word again, or press Escape, and it goes back.
6. Every press counts — holding, claiming and putting back all cost one. A perfect round is twelve presses, two per pair, and Presses left shows the spare allowance on top of that.
7. Find all six pairs before the presses run out.

How can you tell whether two words rhyme just by looking at them?

Read the rime — the vowel and everything after it — as a single block, and ignore everything in front of it. On four-letter words that block is almost always the last two letters, so the test is mechanical: cover the first two letters with your thumb and compare what is left. Cake and bike both leave ke, so they rhyme. Cake and mile leave ke and le, so they do not, even though both end in e and both look like ordinary "silent e" words.

The reason this needs practising at all is that the final letter is the loudest thing on a printed word, and it is the least reliable. Of the 1292 four-letter words this game draws from, 17 different endings finish in e and 16 finish in s — so "they both end in e" narrows the field almost not at all. The letter before the last one is what does the work, and it is the one your eye skips. Say the two words out loud if you are unsure: your ear checks the rime automatically, which is exactly what your eye is refusing to do.

Why does every board look so confusing?

Because it was built that way, deliberately and measurably. Six unrelated endings — say ll, ke, st, ar, ow and ub — would make the puzzle a one-letter scan and teach you nothing. So after the first family is drawn at random, each of the remaining five is chosen from twenty random draws as the one that shares exactly one rime letter with a family already on the board. That is what puts nd next to nt, sk next to lk, and le next to lf. A finished board typically holds between 28 and 60 pairs of words that look alike and do not rhyme, and every one of them is a place where reading both letters is the only thing that saves you.

Is every word guaranteed to have a partner?

Yes, exactly one, and by construction rather than by luck. The whole word list is grouped by its last two letters before any round exists, and only groups with two or more members are kept — 130 of them. A board takes six of those groups without ever taking the same one twice, and each group deals two different words. A group's key is its ending, so the six endings on the board are different from each other; and because a word's ending is its group's ending, every word on the board shares its ending with precisely one other word. There is no scoring rule that could disagree with the board, and no puzzle that cannot be finished.

Why does holding a word cost a press?

Because otherwise the fastest way to play is not to think at all. If only mistakes were charged, you could hold one word and try all eleven others in turn, and the board would solve itself without a single decision. Charging one press for every touch moves the cost to where the thinking is: perfect play is exactly two presses per pair, and the spare allowance shown on screen is precisely the room you have to be wrong in. It is also why the round always ends — nothing changes the board for free, so the allowance always runs down.

The size of that allowance is not a guess either. Once a board is dealt, the look-alike pairs on it are counted, and the spare presses are a function of that count: a board thick with near-rhymes forgives more than a plain one, because the mistakes it causes are the puzzle working rather than you failing.

Is there any money or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. No currency, no prizes, nothing to buy, no lives to refill, and nothing here you could ever put money on. It is a reading puzzle, and that is the whole of it.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both, with the same rules and the same information. Arrows or WASD move, Enter or Space holds and claims, Escape puts a held word back, and the cursor never stops on a pair already crossed off — so a keyboard player walks precisely the tiles a mouse player can click. Every tile is a real button whose spoken label is the word and its ending spelled out letter by letter, so nd is read as "N D" rather than mumbled. The live region announces the same sentence the board shows: which endings a wrong claim actually had, how many pairs are left, and how many presses remain. Paired and wrong tiles carry a ✓ and a ✕ and the crossed-off ending in text, so nothing at all depends on telling colours apart.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — the word list, the grouping, the scoring and the rules. Nothing is fetched while you play, there is no server involved at any point, and no round you play is recorded anywhere but in your own browser.

Every word is four letters, drawn from this site's own list of 1292 common English four-letter words, which yields 130 usable rhyme families. A rhyme is defined here as an exact match on the last two letters — a spelling test, not a pronunciation one. That is deliberate, because it is checkable by you as well as by the game and because it is how rime is taught, but it does mean the board follows the spelling rather than the sound. Some and home count as a pair though nobody would rhyme them aloud, and done and spun do not count though everybody would. The board is always twelve words in six pairs, and the spare allowance runs from four to nine presses depending on how confusable the deal turned out. There is no timer, no streak to protect and no hint button.

Prefix Hunt works the other end of the word: three letters are given and you find every letter that finishes them into something real. Anagram Pairs asks for the same kind of pairing but on letter sets rather than endings, so the canonical form is a sort instead of a suffix. Syllable Split breaks longer words at their joins, which is the same phonics idea one level up. Word Ladder changes one letter at a time and shows you how tightly the four-letter words are connected.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.