Words that rhyme with Apply
There's a particular shape to apply: two-syllable, built on the clipped /ษช/, ending that ends on an open vowel. It's a word everyone uses โ which is what makes it powerful in a lyric. Pool data: the perfect-rhyme column has enough to live in, no near-perfect family slants exist for this one, and the assonance pool runs into the thousands. Its function in a song, meanwhile, is to act as a word everyone uses. Lean on the strict column for the hooks; the slants can colour the verses.
Open apply in RhymeForge โPerfect rhymes (25 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
- awry
- belie
- bonsai
- comply
- decry
- defy
- deny
- descry
- hereby
- lanai
- rely
- retry
- untie
- versailles
- whereby
- goodbye
- imply
- mumbai
- ai
- aye
- bi
- buy
- by
- bye
- chai
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 apply. 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.
- abide
- abides
- admire
- admires
- advice
- advise
- advised
- affine
- affined
- affines
- afire
- alight
- align
- aligned
- aligns
- alike
- aline
- alines
- alive
- allied
- applied
- applies
- apprise
- apprised
- argyll
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- ahoy
- annoy
- decoy
- deploy
- destroy
- employ
- savoy
- enjoy
- bayous
- beigel
- bias
- biased
- bible
- bibles
- bicep
- biceps
- biding
- biker
- bikers
- biking
- binder
- binders
- binding
- bindings
- biome
Consonance (0 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
No consonance matches for apply in our dictionary โ its closing consonant is rare in English.
How songwriters use these rhymes
He left me the apply; I gave him the awry back.
No family rhymes for apply. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
She gave the apply away, then watched it come back as abide.
What we called apply, the lyric heard as ahoy.
No consonance matches for apply โ the closing consonant is rare in our dictionary.
Why apply rhymes the way it does
In our engine, apply registers as a two-syllable word on the high /ษช/ (/ษช/) that doesn't close on a consonant at all. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 83 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 830, assonance 2,115, and consonance 0. 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. How to use it: hold the strict matches for the moments the listener expects, and use the slants to surprise where they don't. Apply pairs especially well with assonance because the vowel column is deeper than the consonant column.
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 apply. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open apply in RhymeForge above.