Peeling the Orange Rhyme:

Douglas R. Hofstadter can trump you all on the "rhymes with orange" topic:

From Tom Lehrer (via "Le Ton Beau de Marot", an excellent book by Douglas R. Hofstadter, one-time author of the Mathematical Recreations column of Scientific American)

        Eating an orange
                while making love
        Makes for bizarre enj-
                oyment thereof

From DRH himself:

        "Make love with an orange,"
                our teacher Tom toots,
        "And you'll harvest bizarre, ing-
                enious fruits!"

Or, an entire poem with Rhymes of Orange on every line from the same DRH:

        A poem without "or-
                ange" as a rhyme is not nice --
        it's a bustling bazaar
                in Jodhpur, with no spice.
        It's a Friday night bar
                in Georgetown, without ice,
        It is Deborah Kerr
                'n John Wayne -- Yul look twice!
        Tiger Woods chipping far
                and just missing -- no dice!
        Yankees blurting "Au revoir"
                in Japan, East/West splice!
        Or a Volkswagen car
                engine smoking -- ach, Scheiß!
        A poem without "or-
                ange" as a rhyme is not nice.

I recall a series of poems entitled
the man who fell in love with his spleen
A new stanza was publised in a magazine
They all ended in the line you'll never find
a rhyme for orange

every week. I only recall one stanza,
It went something like

You can slit your wrists descretly
whilst your family is drowsing,
you can hear your neighbours breathing
through the walls of council housing
you can be so odd, 
you don't find every inch of me arousing,
but you'll never find a rhyme for orange

I almost hate to contribute to this node, but I've been thinking a lot about rhyme lately and so it seems somewhat appropriate.

The answer to the question about things that rhyme with orange depends entirely upon your definition of "rhyme." My dictionary (as a secondary definition) says "A word agreeing with another in terminal sound." This is the kind of rhyme we all learned in grammar school, but in fact the primary definition of rhyme is much broader: "Identity in sound of some part."

With this in mind, I encourage you to consider not only lozenge, which I believe is the closest common word to a "pure" rhyme as you're going to get, but also the whole host of other words ending in -nge, such as:

True, these do not share the -ange ending of orange, but as the A in orange is unstressed, I do not consider this a major issue. So poets, scribble away!

This node is getting to be slightly GTKY, so I'm apprehensive about adding to it, but my soul won't be at piece until I do. This is becuse I have a disc of Ben Folds Five in the car. And I hear She Don't Use Jelly a lot, and whenever I do, I have an urge to add to this node. So I did.

According to The Flaming Lips, who wrote She Don't Use Jelly, store rhymes with orange. Whenever I hear it, I can't help but laugh at that:

I know a girl who
Reminds me of Cher
She's always changing
The color of her hair
She don't use nothing
You buy at the store
She likes her hair to
Be real orange

A reversal of the paradigm, which my grandmother used to recite to me. No, really she did:

"What is the rhyme for porringer?
What is the rhyme for porringer?"
"The King he had a daughter fair,
And gave the Prince of Orange her."

This is presumably a historical reference to the marriage of William and Mary in the seventeenth century, which led to the Glorious Revolution, the Battle of the Boyne and all that stuff. I strongly suspect that Granny Herring, whose didactic instincts were honed by many years as the village schoolmistress, got it from one of the collections by Peter and Iona Opie.


Soit, alternativement:

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