Words that rhyme with Obtuse
Obtuse: two-syllable, a quotidian anchor, vowel sitting on a closing /uห/, ending that ends in a hissed consonant. Common words like this gain weight from the company they keep on the line. The perfect-rhyme pool is one of the deeper ones, the family-rhyme classifier finds nothing, while the assonance column dwarfs the others. If you typed what rhymes with obtuse to land here, the breakdown is this: the deeper map matters more than the headline count. Use the strict rhymes for the structural beats and let slant rhymes do the interior work.
Open obtuse in RhymeForge โPerfect rhymes (25 shown)
Exact match from the stressed vowel onward, with voice-pair near-perfects folded in.
- abstruse
- abuse
- caboose
- deduce
- diffuse
- disuse
- excuse
- produce
- profuse
- recluse
- reduce
- reuse
- seduce
- accrues
- accuse
- amuse
- bemuse
- canoes
- chartreuse
- confuse
- defuse
- ensues
- enthuse
- eschews
- misuse
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 obtuse. 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.
- deduced
- produced
- reduced
- seduced
- accrue
- adieu
- ado
- anew
- askew
- babu
- bamboo
- canoe
- construe
- debut
- ensue
- eschew
- fondue
- kazoo
- perdue
- peru
- pursue
- ragu
- ratu
- redo
- renew
Assonance (25 shown)
Matching vowel sound, consonants ignored. The biggest pool by far, and the workhorse of slant rhyming.
- abused
- accused
- amused
- bemused
- confused
- defused
- diffused
- enthused
- excused
- misused
- perused
- recused
- refused
- reused
- suffused
- transfused
- unused
- abloom
- accrued
- acute
- allude
- alludes
- aloof
- approve
- approved
Consonance (25 shown)
Matching consonant sound, vowels ignored. Best for texture and tension rather than punch.
- abbas
- abyss
- across
- adverse
- advice
- aggress
- alas
- amass
- amiss
- apace
- apiece
- aris
- assess
- averse
- caprice
- caress
- cerise
- coerce
- concise
- confess
- crevasse
- debase
- decease
- decrease
- deface
How songwriters use these rhymes
Obtuse in the first verse, abstruse in the second, and a song between them.
No family rhymes for obtuse. Reach for assonance below for the closest slant.
Obtuse alone, deduced in the chorus โ the song builds the consonant in.
Obtuse at the line's beginning, abused at its end, same vowel humming through both.
Obtuse and abbas share the closing shape, even when the vowels disagree.
Why obtuse rhymes the way it does
Obtuse is two-syllable, its rhyme-relevant vowel sitting on a back /uห/, then it softens into a fricative tail. In our 54,000-word dictionary the perfect-rhyme pool returns 122 matches, family rhymes 0, additive and subtractive together 151, assonance 3,572, and consonance 469. 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. Writing-tip: don't end every line with the strict rhyme. Use the slant columns at the joints and the strict matches at the seams. Obtuse works hardest when the slant carries the verse and the strict match closes the chorus.
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 obtuse. For interactive search, voice-pair highlighting, syllable counting and quality sorting, open obtuse in RhymeForge above.