Words that rhyme with Contempt
Contempt reads as a stop-by-stop-grocery-shelf word on the page; phonetically it's two-syllable, anchored on the front /ษ/, ending where it lands on a stopped consonant. Its everydayness lets the song surprise around it. What rhymes with contempt? The honest answer: the picked top sets below tell most of the story: perfect rhymes hand you a small starter set, the family-rhyme classifier finds nothing, and the slant-by-vowel pool is enormous. Lyrically, the word arrives as a quotidian anchor. The slant-by-vowel column will carry you a long way past the strict matches.
Open contempt in RhymeForge โPerfect rhymes (5 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
- attempt
- exempt
- unkempt
- empt
- tempt
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 contempt. 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.
- attempts
- exempts
- empts
- tempts
- hemp
- kemp
- temp
- abet
- accept
- adept
- barbette
- barrette
- beget
- beset
- brunet
- brunette
- cadet
- cassette
- chevrette
- cornet
- corvette
- diskette
- doucet
- duet
- except
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- against
- commenced
- condensed
- dispensed
- entrenched
- retrenched
- unfenced
- avenged
- perplexed
- helped
- temps
- condemn
- condemned
- condemns
- amends
- ascends
- attends
- befriends
- commends
- consents
- contends
- defends
- depends
- descends
- descents
Consonance (25 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
- decamped
- encamped
- revamped
- compote
- empty
- humpty
- preempt
- sumpter
- trumpet
- bumped
- camped
- clamped
- cramped
- damped
- dumped
- humped
- jumped
- lumped
- plumped
- prompt
- pumped
- slumped
- stamped
- stomped
- stumped
How songwriters use these rhymes
You said contempt, I heard attempt, neither of us was wrong.
No family rhymes for contempt. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
Contempt at the verse, attempts at the line that follows it.
What we called contempt, the lyric heard as against.
The contempt at the start of the line, the decamped tucked inside it, same consonant frame.
Why contempt rhymes the way it does
In our engine, contempt registers as a two-syllable word on the centred /ษ/ (/ษ/) that shuts cleanly on a stopped consonant. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 5 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 110, assonance 13,007, and consonance 34. That's a narrow strict column with a very deep slant well beneath it. Modern songwriting reads those slants as rhymes; the ear has been trained on them for a century. 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. Contempt 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 contempt. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open contempt in RhymeForge above.