What Is Slant Rhyme and Why Use It?
Quick answer: Slant rhyme is a near rhyme: words that almost match, like stone and gone or heart and hurt. Poets use it for subtle music where full rhyme feels too neat.
Slant rhyme, also called near rhyme, half rhyme or off rhyme, is a rhyme between words that almost match but not quite: stone and gone, heart and hurt, soul and all. Usually the final consonants agree while the vowels differ, or the vowels chime while the consonants drift. Poets use it because it delivers rhyme's music at half the volume, and because its slight wrongness can carry emotional truth that a perfect chime would falsify.
It is not a mistake or a failed full rhyme. Emily Dickinson built a whole style on it in the 1860s, Wilfred Owen turned it into a weapon in his war poems, and it is now the default rhyme of most contemporary formal poetry, not to mention rap, where multisyllabic near rhyme is the standard toolkit.
What counts as slant
The family includes several techniques, all making partial sound matches.
Why the wrongness works
Full rhyme produces a click of closure, satisfying, complete, slightly smug. Slant rhyme produces a click that does not quite close, and the ear registers the gap as unease. That makes it the natural music of grief, doubt, war and ambivalence. Wilfred Owen ends lines in 'Strange Meeting' on pairs like escaped/scooped and groined/groaned, and the constant near-miss makes the whole poem sound like the ground shifting; perfect rhymes would have made trench warfare sound resolved.
Dickinson's slant rhymes do something related: they let her keep the hymn stanza's shape while refusing its certainties. When she rhymes 'Room' with 'Storm', the form promises resolution and the sound withholds it, which is her theology in miniature.
Practical advantages for your own poems
Slant rhyme multiplies your options enormously. English has three full rhymes for 'love' worth using; it has dozens of slant partners (leave, live, laugh, sleeve, enough). That freedom means you stop bending sentences to reach rhyme words, which is the single most common flaw in beginner formal verse, and one that scoring judges notice immediately when marking language.
A worked micro-example: full rhyme first, 'The nurses came at eight to take her chart. / The morning did its best to play its part.' Neat, and slightly glib. Now slanted: 'The nurses came at eight to take her chart. / The morning carried on, without her heart.' Keep both words but soften one pairing further, chart/short, and the couplet grieves instead of chiming. The technique is that adjustable: you choose exactly how much closure each moment deserves.
What poets can take from this
- Match final consonants and vary the vowel for the classic slant sound (stone/begun).
- Use full rhyme for moments of real closure and slant rhyme for doubt, grief and irony.
- When stuck for a rhyme, list words sharing just the final consonant sound; the options multiply tenfold.
- Read Dickinson and Owen aloud, marking every rhyme that refuses to click shut.
- Test by ear, not by eye: love/move looks like rhyme but is not slant rhyme's sound.
- In an ABAB or couplet poem, mixing roughly half slant and half full rhymes keeps the music alive without monotony.
Try it yourself
Write a twelve-line poem about a promise that was almost kept, using only slant rhymes at line ends. Let the final couplet be your one full rhyme, and make it hurt.
Questions
Is slant rhyme still rhyme?
Yes. It sits on the rhyme spectrum between full rhyme and no rhyme, and it satisfies rhyme schemes: an ABAB quatrain can be built entirely on slant pairings, as Dickinson's poems prove.
What is the difference between slant rhyme and assonance?
Assonance is any repetition of vowel sounds anywhere in nearby words. Slant rhyme is a line-end (or scheme-position) pairing that partially matches, which may work through assonance, consonance or both.
Why did Emily Dickinson use slant rhyme?
Partly by ear and partly by conviction: near rhyme let her keep hymn-stanza music while unsettling its certainty. The not-quite-resolution of her rhymes matches the not-quite-resolution of her subjects.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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