Words that rhyme with Applause
There's a particular shape to applause: two-syllable, built on the open /ษห/, ending that tails through a fricative. Common words like this gain weight from the company they keep on the line. Take the rhyme counts on their own terms: there's a deep bench of perfect rhymes here, no family rhymes survive the strict family test, the assonance pool runs into the thousands. Take the lyric role separately and it's a word everyone uses. Pull from the perfect column first; it has range you can use across a whole song.
Open applause in RhymeForge โPerfect rhymes (25 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
- because
- withdraws
- guffaws
- macaws
- across
- lacrosse
- emboss
- recross
- cause
- clause
- pause
- claws
- daws
- draws
- flaws
- gauze
- haws
- jaws
- laws
- paws
- straws
- thaws
- cos
- cross
- loss
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 applause. 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.
- withdraw
- bashaw
- guffaw
- macaw
- redraw
- draw
- jaw
- law
- raw
- shaw
- straw
- paused
- claw
- daw
- flaw
- haw
- maw
- paw
- saw
- thaw
- waugh
- foresaw
- aw
- caw
- chaw
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- exhaust
- aboard
- abroad
- absorb
- absorbed
- accord
- afford
- along
- assault
- award
- before
- belong
- divorce
- endorsed
- enforce
- enforced
- escort
- explore
- explored
- perform
- performed
- record
- reform
- restore
- support
Ending rhymes (0 shown)
A shared unstressed final syllable โ the window/shadow slant. Weaker than a perfect rhyme, completely idiomatic in song.
No ending rhymes for applause โ its final syllable carries the stress, so the columns above do the work.
Consonance (25 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
- advise
- arise
- surprise
- ablaze
- accrues
- accuse
- agrees
- amaze
- amuse
- annoys
- arrays
- ballets
- betrays
- bouquets
- canoes
- chalets
- cliches
- comprise
- concurs
- confers
- confuse
- conveys
- decays
- decrees
- degrees
How songwriters use these rhymes
Every time I write applause, the next line wants because.
No family rhymes for applause. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
Applause alone, withdraw in the chorus โ the song builds the consonant in.
Applause on the upbeat, exhaust on the down โ the slant does the work.
No ending rhymes for applause โ its final syllable carries the stress, so the columns above do the work.
Applause and advise: the vowels are different but the consonants are kin.
Why applause rhymes the way it does
Applause sits on the wide /ษห/, transcribed /ษห/ in our engine, and trails off into a fricative. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 53 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 50, assonance 6,427, and consonance 1158. That's a deep perfect column. The song can ride strict rhymes from end to end, only sliding into assonance when the line needs to surprise. 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. Applause 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 applause. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open applause in RhymeForge above.