Words that rhyme with Courtesy
For lyric work, courtesy behaves as a word everyone uses. Sound-wise: three-syllable, vowel on the tight /ɪ/, finally it doesn't close on a consonant at all. The lyric earns it by placement, not by selection. Its job in a lyric is a quotidian anchor, holding down whatever line it lands in. Type rhymes for courtesy into any dictionary and the answer is roughly the same: the perfect column comes up empty, nothing lands in the family-rhyme column, and the assonance pool is the one that won't run out. The contemporary ear forgives — and prefers — the assonance matches here.
Open courtesy in RhymeForge →Perfect rhymes (0 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
No strict perfect rhymes for courtesy in our dictionary. The slant columns below carry the load.
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 courtesy. 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.
- courtesies
- disconcert
- reassert
- alert
- assert
- avert
- dessert
- divert
- evert
- exert
- inert
- insert
- invert
- overt
- revert
- subvert
- unhurt
- connoisseur
- intersperse
- reimburse
- reoccur
- restauranteur
- saboteur
- blurt
- cert
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- currency
- certainly
- certainties
- certainty
- currencies
- earnestly
- nervously
- purposely
- burgundies
- burgundy
- circuitry
- currently
- fervently
- germany
- perfectly
- urgency
- urgently
- internecine
- uncertainly
- uncertainties
- uncertainty
- absurdity
- hercules
- absurdities
- murderous
Consonance (25 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
- courteous
- howitzer
- riotous
- tertius
- traitorous
- uterus
- annotates
- arthritis
- berettas
- botrytis
- bronchitis
- burritos
- cabernets
- cigarettes
- conjugates
- coyotes
- desecrates
- detritus
- falconets
- gastritis
- hiatus
- jujitsu
- keiretsu
- luncheonettes
- minarets
How songwriters use these rhymes
No strict perfect rhymes for courtesy in our dictionary. The slant columns below carry the load.
No family rhymes for courtesy. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
It started as courtesy, ended as courtesies, same vowel either way.
All night the courtesy turned into currency, vowel-first, consonants letting go.
Courtesy and courteous: the vowels are different but the consonants are kin.
Why courtesy rhymes the way it does
Courtesy sits on the clipped /ɪ/, transcribed /ɪ/ in our engine, and ends on an open vowel. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 0 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 113, assonance 4,426, and consonance 429. 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. The songwriter's move is to pick a small set of strict rhymes for the chorus and open up to family and assonance through the verses. Courtesy rewards slant rhyming because the strict pool, when over-used, calls attention to itself.
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 courtesy. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open courtesy in RhymeForge above.