Bouts-Rimés
Quick answer: Bouts-rimés is a French parlour game in which poets write verse to a preset list of rhyme words. Learn its salon history and how to play it today.
Bouts-rimés, French for rhymed ends, is a verse game in which a poet receives a fixed list of rhyme words and must build a poem around them, keeping the words in their given order at the ends of the lines. The rhymes usually arrive deliberately mismatched, pairing something lofty with something ridiculous, so the fun lies in stitching sense across an absurd scaffold. Traditionally the target form is a sonnet, which means fourteen line endings handed to you before you have written a single word.
Poets still play bouts-rimés because it flips the usual order of composition. Instead of hunting for a rhyme to fit your meaning, you hunt for a meaning to fit your rhymes. That reversal loosens the grip of habit and forces invention, which is why writing teachers keep pulling this seventeenth century game out of the drawer.
How the Game Works
Someone draws up a list of rhyme words, say eight or fourteen, arranged in a rhyme scheme such as ABBA ABBA for a sonnet's octave. Players may not change the words, reorder them, or move them away from the line endings. Everything else is open: subject, tone, metre, imagery.
Suppose your given endings are rain, glass, train, pass. You might produce something like: The station roof lets down its beads of rain, / a blurred world trembling in the ticket glass; / I hold my breath and wait to board the train / that takes the years I did not use, to pass. The endings were fixed, yet the melancholy little scene is entirely yours. That is the whole trick of the game.
A Short History
The story goes that a minor seventeenth century French poet named Dulot complained that thieves had stolen his manuscripts, including three hundred sonnets. When pressed, he admitted the sonnets were not exactly written yet, only their rhymes were prepared. Paris found this so funny that composing poems to preset rhymes became a salon craze, and the satirist Sarasin later mocked the fashion in verse.
The game refused to die. In 1864 Alexandre Dumas invited the poets of France to compose bouts-rimés to a single set of rhymes and published hundreds of the results. In England the Rossetti household treated it as sport: Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti timed each other writing bouts-rimés sonnets, and several of Christina's early published sonnets began life as entries in these family contests.
Why It Is Worth Playing Now
Bouts-rimés is one of the best rhyme workouts available, because it removes the pressure of choosing rhymes and concentrates all your effort on syntax, surprise, and sense. You learn to write toward a fixed word without letting the line sound steered, a skill every formal poet needs. Played with friends, it also produces comparison you can learn from: everyone works from identical endings, so the differences between poems are pure differences of imagination. Judges in contests such as Writory's monthly round score language and creativity separately, and this game trains exactly that pairing.
What poets can take from this
- Read the whole rhyme list first and decide on a situation that could plausibly contain the oddest word.
- Write the hardest ending first, then build its line backwards.
- Let sentences run across line breaks so the preset endings feel less like fence posts.
- Set a timer; speed keeps you inventive and stops fiddling.
- Swap lists with a friend and compare results from identical rhymes.
Try it yourself
Ask a friend for eight nouns, arrange them as ABAB CDCD line endings without changing their order, and write two quatrains that tell one small story using every word exactly where it was placed.
Questions
What does bouts-rimés mean in English?
It translates literally as rhymed ends or rhymed endings. The name refers to the list of rhyme words supplied in advance, which players must use, in order, at the ends of their lines.
Does a bouts-rimés poem have to be a sonnet?
No, though the sonnet was the traditional target because its fourteen endings and strict scheme made the game hardest. Any rhymed form works: quatrains, couplets, even a limerick if the list allows it.
Is bouts-rimés the same as a rhyme scheme exercise?
Not quite. A rhyme scheme exercise fixes the pattern of rhymes but lets you choose the words. Bouts-rimés fixes the actual words themselves, which is far more constraining and usually more fun.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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