Words that rhyme with Ape
The phonetic facts first: ape is two-syllable, the rhyme-bearing vowel is a low-front /æ/, and the line shuts cleanly on a stopped consonant. It's a word everyone uses — which is what makes it powerful in a lyric. It serves as a stop-by-stop-grocery-shelf word in most lyrics. Songwriters who arrive looking for what rhymes with ape find the same uneven map: the perfect-rhyme list is short, family rhymes are simply absent, and the assonance options multiply into the thousands. The interior life of any lyric on this word is going to be the assonance list.
Open ape in RhymeForge →Perfect rhymes (17 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
- cape
- crepe
- drape
- gape
- grape
- pape
- rape
- scape
- scrape
- shape
- tape
- babe
- mabe
- agape
- escape
- reshape
- videotape
Family rhymes (0 shown)
Same vowel, with a single consonant swapped for one from the same articulatory family. Slant rhymes that pass the ear test.
No family rhymes for ape. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant rhyming.
Additive & subtractive (25 shown)
Same core sound, with an extra consonant added (or one dropped) at the end.
- apes
- caped
- capes
- crepes
- draped
- drapes
- grapes
- raped
- rapes
- scraped
- scrapes
- shaped
- shapes
- taped
- tapes
- traipse
- a
- ae
- ay
- bay
- baye
- bey
- blay
- bley
- brae
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- babes
- ace
- aced
- ache
- ached
- aches
- age
- aged
- aid
- aide
- aides
- aids
- ail
- ails
- aim
- aimed
- aims
- aine
- ake
- ale
- ales
- ame
- ames
- ane
- ate
Consonance (25 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
- app
- blip
- bop
- burp
- cap
- cep
- chap
- chip
- chirp
- chop
- clap
- clip
- coop
- cop
- cope
- coupe
- crap
- cripe
- crop
- croup
- cup
- dip
- dope
- drip
- droop
How songwriters use these rhymes
She kept her ape close, and her cape closer.
No family rhymes for ape. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
She gave the ape away, then watched it come back as apes.
Ape on the upbeat, babes on the down — the slant does the work.
Ape and app share the closing shape, even when the vowels disagree.
Why ape rhymes the way it does
The phonology of ape is a two-syllable core: a low-front /æ/ (/æ/), then it ends with a clean stop. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 17 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 165, assonance 4,917, and consonance 332. The empty family column matters less than it looks. Family rhymes are a strict-classifier construct; the songwriter's ear accepts most assonance matches in their place. Practical: skim the strict column first and pick the two or three matches you can sing without thinking. Then move to assonance for the in-between lines. Ape reads as more memorable when the strict matches are reserved for the line endings that matter most.
More songwriting tools
Stuck on the chord side of the song? The chord progression builder on the Undercover Zest home page maps every common progression in every key, with borrowed chords and substitutions called out. Need a fresh angle on a stuck lyric? CollisionLab generates unexpected word pairings to break a writer's block. All free, no signup.
About RhymeForge
RhymeForge is the free rhyme finder built into Undercover Zest. It searches over 54,000 words across five rhyme types: perfect, family, additive, assonance, and consonance. It is built for songwriters, not crossword solvers, and the slant-rhyme classifications are tuned accordingly.
This page is a static snapshot of the rhymes for ape. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open ape in RhymeForge above.