Words that rhyme with Cross
There's a particular shape to cross: one-syllable, built on the open /ษ/, ending that ends in a hissed consonant. The lyric earns it by placement, not by selection. Songwriters reach for it as a common-tongue word. Perfect-rhyme territory is narrow, no family-rhyme matches turn up, and the slant-vowel column carries the page on its own. Reach for assonance first; the strict list is the safety net underneath it.
Open cross in RhymeForge โPerfect rhymes (25 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
- cos
- coss
- dos
- doss
- dross
- gloss
- goss
- joss
- koss
- loss
- mos
- moss
- poss
- pross
- sauce
- schloss
- soss
- toss
- cause
- clause
- claws
- daws
- draws
- flaws
- gaus
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 cross. 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.
- cost
- crossed
- frost
- frosts
- glossed
- lost
- mosk
- tossed
- aw
- caw
- chaw
- claw
- craw
- daw
- draw
- faw
- flaw
- gaw
- gnaw
- haugh
- haw
- jaw
- law
- maw
- paw
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- paused
- all
- alls
- aught
- auld
- aune
- awed
- bald
- balk
- balked
- balks
- ball
- balled
- balls
- baud
- baur
- bawd
- bawl
- bawled
- bawls
- blog
- blogs
- boar
- board
- boards
Consonance (25 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
- ace
- ass
- base
- bass
- basse
- bice
- bis
- bless
- bliss
- boose
- brace
- bras
- brass
- brus
- burse
- bus
- buss
- case
- cease
- chace
- chase
- chasse
- chess
- choice
- class
How songwriters use these rhymes
I keep on saying cross, and the night keeps saying cos back.
No family rhymes for cross. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
She gave the cross away, then watched it come back as cost.
Cross on the upbeat, paused on the down โ the slant does the work.
Cross and ace share the closing shape, even when the vowels disagree.
Why cross rhymes the way it does
Pull cross apart phonetically and you get a one-syllable word with the short /ษ/ (/ษ/) as the rhyme-bearing vowel; the close ends in a hissed consonant. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 41 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 47, assonance 6,880, and consonance 439. 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. In the room with a guitar: write toward the strict rhyme first, then go back through and replace the obvious ones with the assonance matches that earned their place. Cross is a word that benefits from the second pass.
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 cross. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open cross in RhymeForge above.