Words that rhyme with Forty
Forty: two-syllable, an unguarded everyday word, vowel sitting on the high /ɪ/, ending that opens out at the end. Its everydayness lets the song surprise around it. Two readings: as data — the strict-rhyme column is bare, no near-perfect family slants exist for this one, the assonance options multiply into the thousands; as lyric — a common-tongue word. Modern lyric writing on this word lives almost entirely in the assonance pool.
Open forty in RhymeForge →Perfect rhymes (4 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
- shorty
- sortie
- sporty
- lordy
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 forty. 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.
- forties
- sorties
- abhor
- adore
- ashore
- before
- decor
- deplore
- explore
- galore
- ignore
- implore
- livor
- outpour
- outscore
- prewar
- rapport
- restore
- senor
- wherefore
- baur
- boar
- bore
- chore
- cor
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- storied
- courtly
- portly
- shortly
- chlorine
- corby
- corgi
- corky
- corny
- faulty
- frosty
- glories
- horkey
- horny
- horsey
- jaunty
- lofty
- lorries
- monty
- orgy
- porgy
- porky
- quarries
- salty
- sorely
Consonance (25 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
- chlorate
- forte
- courter
- mortar
- porta
- porter
- quarter
- quarto
- shorter
- snorter
- sorter
- barite
- barret
- beret
- carat
- carrot
- curate
- ferret
- ferrite
- garret
- karat
- merit
- parrot
- pirate
- pyrite
How songwriters use these rhymes
He left me the forty; I gave him the shorty back.
No family rhymes for forty. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
Forty at the verse, forties at the line that follows it.
All night the forty turned into storied, vowel-first, consonants letting go.
Forty and chlorate share the closing shape, even when the vowels disagree.
Why forty rhymes the way it does
In our engine, forty registers as a two-syllable word on the clipped /ɪ/ (/ɪ/) that ends on an open vowel. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 4 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 134, assonance 8,144, and consonance 149. 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 guidance: read the song aloud and listen for where a slant would tighten the line. Strict rhymes are the structural skeleton; the slant columns are where the personality of the lyric lives. With forty, the slant work is doing more weight-bearing than it looks.
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 forty. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open forty in RhymeForge above.