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What about that door hinge at the back?

"When mired in a problem's confusion,
heed not to the boundary illusion.
So when rhyming with orange,
one has to be more inge-
nious to find a solution."
Daniel F. Wallace

When some person is expected to rhyme a word that has no rhyme in the dictionary. Orange is the word most commonly used for this; other allegedly unrhymable words in English include silver, purple, month, bulb, circle and film.

This often is the consequence of them rhyming everything said by another character, who tries to stump them with something unrhymable. There are five conceivable outcomes:

  1. The person thinks for a moment, shrugs and gives up.
  2. The person thinks for a long while, then comes up with an amazing trick rhyme.
  3. The person cheats and uses a word that doesn't rhyme but is funny.
  4. The person cheats by rhyming the word with itself.
  5. The person cheats by using a word from another language.

Often, if they manage to make a rhyme, it will be an Ogden Nash-style Painful Rhyme, Rhyming with Itself, perhaps even a Mid Word Rhyme. Usually if the word is "orange", the rhyme will be "door hinge"; how well that works depends on your accent. It can be alleviated with a Bilingual Rhyme if you speak French, where there are multiple words that rhyme with "orange".

For anyone who's curious: the word "orange" is difficult to rhyme in the English language because it's of Persian etymology (a relative rarity in English), and entered the language later than most other words for colors. Before being a name for a color, it originally referred exclusively to the fruit, which (being indigenous to East Asia) didn't become widely known in Europe until the Middle Ages, when it was introduced by the Moors. Before the fruit's name caught on as a word for the color, it was likely called "red-yellow" or its equivalent.

Incidentally, many of these words do have rhymes, even without resorting to midword rhyme, slant rhyme, or a non-standard pronunciation for the speaker's normal accent. Orange has sporange (cell structure where spores are produced) and Blorenge (name of a mountain in Wales); silver has chilver (a female lamb); month has granth (Hindi for book, also a Sikh holy text); and purple has burple and chirple, if you're okay with reviving the obsolete suffix -le that means "frequently or tendency to" (eg. Same vein as "crumble" or "sniffle"). That's quite interesting, isn't it? Might happen in an Awkward Poetry Reading.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • This commercial for M&M's with Megan Mullally, in which she rhymes something with every color M&M, but then gets stuck on "orange."
  • This PSA for St. John Ambulance (made by This Is It) has a band of nursery rhyme characters trying to write a jingle about baby CPR, and struggling to come up with a rhyme for "ambulance".
  • In an ad for Liberty Mutual, a group of jump-roping kids end their rhyme mid-jump because nothing rhymes with "Liberty Mutual."
  • The last Vitalite advert consisting of an anthropomorphic sun and a chorus of anthropomorphic sunflowers singing a send-up of "Israelites" by Desmond Dekker had the sun Rage Quit due to being unable to come up with a rhyme for "polyunsatures". This leads to an anthropomorphic moon taking the sun's place before the sun eventually returns due to not taking very kindly to being replaced.

    Audio Plays 
  • Episode three of the Big Finish Doctor Who drama "Doctor Who and the Pirates" is done in the style of a Gilbert and Sullivan homage. The Doctor references the Major-General's song below with "I Am The Very Model of a Gallifreyan Buccaneer", using the phrases "Rassilonian legatee" and "Remember me to Gallifrey" (pronounced here as "Gal-i-free").

    Comic Books 
  • Buster: The last comic has this happen to Watford Gapp when he tries to rhyme "oblige".
    Watford Gapp: I lent Fuss Pot a fiver,
    'Cos I like to oblige,
    But when I asked her for it back,
    She said that she's... er... um...
    Caption: Well, reader... can you think of a rhyme for "oblige"???
  • Etrigan came up with two rhymes for "orange": "door hinge" and "whore binge".
  • Groo the Wanderer: Minstrel sings all of his dialogue in rhyme (which writer Mark Evanier admits is a real pain), In one issue Groo becomes annoyed with Minstrel after acquiring magic powers and wishes that he'd stop rhyming. Minstrel knows the wish has worked when he tries to sing a tribute to a man dressed in orange and can't think of a rhyme for it.
  • Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi: One comic story has Ami attempting to write a song with a rhyme for "orange". Just when she succeeded in finding one ("door hinge"), she got stuck again with "silver".
  • In Injustice: Gods Among Us Year 5, Damian comes into the Batcave singing "Happy birthday dear Alfred/Nothing rhymes with Alfred".
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW):
    • Pinkie Pie leaves the Changeling minions to come up with a rhyme for "orange".
    • In "Rainbow Dash and the Very Bad Day", on one of the occasions where Spike calls Zecora out for missing a rhyme, she defends herself by stating that "muffin", which her previous line had ended on, is very hard to find a rhyme for.
    • In the Friends Forever issue starring Spike and Zecora, one of the signs that Zecora has caught the disease that's been infecting the town is that she starts ending her lines with words that have no obvious rhyme: "purple," "bilge," and "wolf" all appear.
  • Teen Titans Go!: In Issue #42, Raven asks the readers "Why do poets hate the colors orange, purple, and silver?" The answer is "Well, you try coming up with rhymes for those words!"
  • One issue of Gold Key's comic books based on Underdog has the story "Orange Blues", where Simon Barsinister exploits Underdog's Rhymes on a Dime habit by stealing oranges. Being unable to think of a rhyme for "orange” drives Underdog crazy, and he throws another fit when he hears that a stolen car is orange. The canine superhero soon recovers, however, when he catches Cad (who took the orange car) stealing an apple, since Underdog can think of a rhyme for "apple”.
    Underdog: Give up, Simon! Like it or not, I've cracked your plot!
    Simon: But you couldn't have because my crime had no rhyme!
    Underdog: It didn't until I had a chance to grapple with the man who stole the apple!
  • Urbanus: One comic has a man obsessed with rhyming having to come up with a rhyme word for "Herfst" (the Dutch/Flemish word for "Autumn"). He fails, which makes him so mad that he breaks the walls of the prison he's in.

    Comic Strips 
  • The very name of the comic strip Rhymes With Orange refers to this trope, although the strip isn't about that per se.
  • In Zits, Jeremy's musical book report runs into problems when he realizes that nothing rhymes with "Gatsby".

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail: Verse two of the Knights of the Round Table song lampshades this:
    We're knights of the Round Table,
    Our shows are formidable
    But many times, we're given rhymes which are quite unsingable
  • Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme has Mother Goose ask her son Gordon to give a rhyme for "orange" at the beginning of the film.
  • From The Muppets (2011):
    Life's a piece of pie/With someone to stir and someone to fry
    Life's a bunch of flowers/With someone to while away the hours
    Life's a fillet of fish/, uhhhh... Yes it is!
  • "I'm Ridin' for a Fall" from Thank Your Lucky Stars:
    Oh yes, I know, she'll be spending my sugar.
    I know, she'll be spending my sugar.
    I know, she'll be spending my sugar.
    But oh—you can't rhyme sugar!

    Literature 
  • In the Adventures of Dunno, when the titular protagonist tries out poetry, Posey, the local poet who he asks for advice, gives him a task to rhyme the word paklya (oakum). The protagonist comes up with a few nonexistent but funny-sounding words. In the official English publication by Raduga Publishers (translated by Margaret Wettlin), the word is scissors.
  • In Automated Alice, the Author Avatar Zenith O'Clock is happy to make up his own "frictional" words to make his poems rhyme:
    Nothing can rhyme with an orange
    The people cry in ignorance:
    Forgetting in their ignorange
    That words can be made to dance.
  • In Asimov's Black Widowers series, one character tries to summarise The Iliad as a series of limericks, but grinds to a halt over the difficulty of rhyming Diomedes.
  • The board book But Not The Hippopotamus by Sandra Boynton is all about this trope.
  • The poem "Cietrzew" ("The grouse") by the Polish poet Stanislaw Baranczak is about the titular bird lamenting that no Polish poet seems capable of finding a rhyme to his name. Naturally, the poem itself includes several different ones.
  • The German classic would be "Mensch", human. "Die dampfenden Hälse der Pferde im Turm zu Babel" (translating that would be pointless) by Franz Fühmann is a language-game book for children, and of course he has to tackle that one. His characters resort to dialect ("den kenn'sch"), splitting ("Hafensch-lachterei") until the dummy, who doesn't see the problem, rhymes it on "Ranch", which is a well-established loan word (well, maybe not in the former German Democratic Republic...lampshading ensues). Two other poets rhymed the word by inflecting it: In the 19th century Heinrich Heine rhymed "Menschen" ("humans") with a shortened "abendländ'schen" (the adjective "occidental", also in plural), while in the 20th Peter Rühmkorf, who rhymed "Die schönsten Verse des Menschen" with "sind die Gottfried Bennschen" ("The most beautiful rhymes of Man are those by (poet) Gottfried Benn").
  • Randall Garrett tackled three, all of which rhyme better than "door hinge":
    ''I ate a poisoned orange;
    Now I lie upon my bed.
    I keep seeing more and more ang-
    elic forms around my head.

    Though my hair has turned to silver,
    I have never, ever lied,
    And old age finds me still ver-
    acity personified.

    Of all the English words there are,
    There is no rhyme for month.
    I tried and failed a hundred times!
    I succeeded the hundred and oneth.
  • Arthur Guiterman managed to defeat this trope on a technicality.
    ''In Sparkill buried lies that man of mark
    Who brought the Obelisk to Central Park,
    Redoubtable Commander H.H. Gorringe,
    Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for "orange".
  • Feral Creatures: A spotted ratfish has the misfortune of overhearing S.T. compose a poem that rhymes on the second and fourth lines. The crow gets stuck after he ends a line with "sovereign", resulting in the last stanza Rhyming with Itself.
    What the great fuck rhymes with sovereign?
  • Halo: Evolutions: In the short story Human Weakness, the Gravemind brags how can speak in perfect trochaic heptameter and form complex poems thanks to having absorbed the minds of poets. Cortana snarks that she won't be waiting for him to find a rhyme for orange, but the Gravemind merely responds "Orange, in what language? I have consumed so many."
  • In Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Jonathan Strange's attempts to become a poet stalled when he had trouble with a rhyme for "let love suffice". In this case it wasn't that no rhymes existed, but that he couldn't find any that were remotely suitable. After coming up with "sunk in vice" (hardly appropriate) "a pair of mice" (nonsense) and "what's the price?" (simply vulgar) he went for a ride, and apparently forgot about the whole business.
  • Vladimir Mayakovsky, an unorthodox late Imperial Russian turned Soviet poet, was known among other things for bold and untried, if imprecise, rhymes in the Russian language. He often deliberately put the most expressive word at the end, even if it was usually considered unrhymable, and came up with a rhyme for it, come fire or water.
  • An anonymous collective of Imperial Russian satirical poets known under the collective pen name Kozma Prutkov did play with this in their poem Military Aphorisms. In Russian, the word "Europe" (Yevropa) is considered the least rhymable; there is only one word that rhymes with it, and it is semi-obscene with the meaning of "buttocks". The poem uses the word for "Europe", than plays the audience's expectations of the butt-word, and changes it last second to "shlyapa" (hat) (with the obvious inkling that they really mean butt).
  • Mr Bean's Diary, an authorized spin-off publication of Mr. Bean, has one sequence where he joins a poetry class and attempts to find a rhyme for "orange", considering "blancmange", "Stonehenge", and finally "lozenge".
  • In The Mystery of Errors, a novel in which a young William Shakespeare and friend get jobs at the Globe Theatre and solve a murder, his friend challenges Shakespeare to rhyme orange. Shakespeare came up with "door hinge" immediately, but his friend is skeptical.
    "What kind of rhyme is that?"
    "Perfectly acceptable."
  • Ogden Nash:
    There are no rhymes for orange or silver,
    Unless liberties you pilfer.
    • Likewise, in his poem "Very Like a Whale", Nash manages to rhyme "purple", via "interpolate them" and "dressed in gold and purple ate them"'.
  • Rhyming the unrhymeable: Ove Michaelsen has written a two-part limerick based on rhymes for orange, purple, and silver.
  • The Adam Rex picture book Nothing Rhymes with Orange is based on this gag. The dilemma is eventually solved when the other fruit decide to include orange by inventing their own rhyme, "smorange."
  • A Scottish Nursery Rhyme from Jacobite days manages to find an unlikely rhyme by invoking the supporters of William of Orange:
    ''O what's the rhyme to porringer?
    Ken ye the rhyme to porringer?
    King James the seventh had ae dochter,
    And he ga'e her to an Oranger.
  • River of Dancing Gods: In Vengeance of the Dancing Gods, there's a magical oracle who can only speak in rhyme. He keeps a guy called Porange Chilver around as insurance, in the case he accidentally ends a sentence with "orange" or "silver".
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events: Nobody can make a couplet about Count Olaf without insulting both pilaf (for comparing it to the despicable Olaf) and the English language (for attempting to use such a half-rhyme).
    • The Gothic Archies' Spin-Off album gives us:
      I mean, horrors
      Count Olaf
      Is no laugh-
      ing matter...
    • And:
      ''In the whole of
      The soul of
      Count Olaf
      There's no love...
  • In The Sot Weed Factor, the poet protagonist and a friend have a rhyming contest at one point and the protagonist triumphantly does a short verse ending in month. Then, his friend does one ending in an obscure word, onth.
  • The Polish poet Julian Tuwim wrote a series of limericks where he found rhymes for some of the most unrhymeable words in the Polish language (such as mandryl (mandrill), bukszpan (boxwood), etc.).
  • The poem W by James Reeves:
    ''The King sent for his wise men all
    To find a rhyme for W.
    When they had thought a good long time,
    But could not think of a single rhyme,
    "I'm sorry," said he, "to trouble you."
  • Wayside School Gets A Little Stranger: One of the students (Allison) chooses to write a poem about purple without immediately realizing the implications. After much despair, she manages to rhyme it with "burp'll." It is arguably the most inspiring rhyme in the class, as other students either became lost among endless easy options (Rondi's "Blue"), cheated (Joy's "Brown" which just copied Mrs. Jewls' sample), went off topic (Dana's "Pink" which she used to insult John), used painful rhymes (Kathy's "Yellow" included all words that ended in "ell" followed by "oh"), were very short (Stephen's "Green") or abandoned rhyming altogether (Joe's "Red" which used past-tense "-ed" suffixes where the "e" was silent).
  • In one of The Zack Files books, Zack got "rhyme disease" and could only speak in rhyme. His doctor suggested having him say "orange" to see what would happen, but no sound came out of his mouth.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 3rd Rock from the Sun: Sally, Tom, and Harry write an inspiring anti-racism poem. Even though the word "racism" is used before a stanza, they make unneeded attempts to replace it with other words in following stanzas, such as "PlayStation" and "Claymation".
  • On an episode of Barney & Friends Barney is unable to find a rhyme for "purple" during a color rhyming game coming up with "turple" and "urple".
  • Referenced in one episode The Big Bang Theory:
    Raj: I was just feeling blue.
    Sheldon: Blue. As in depressed.
    Raj: Well, not so much depressed as lonely.
    Sheldon: I don't know what color lonely is.
    Raj: What?
    Sheldon: Red is angry, yellow is frightened, green is jealous, and blue is depressed. Perhaps we can assign a color to lonely.
    Raj: Nothing rhymes with "orange". It's probably lonely.
    Sheldon: Alright. Come in, you look positively orange with loneliness. No, I don't see that catching on at all.
  • The Big Comfy Couch had an episode where Loonette and Molly play a rhyming game and the rule is that "'Orange' isn't allowed". Then after the viewers are treated to a segment with the Foley family (the doll family in Loonette's doll house) the response to Molly breaking the rule is this:
    Loonette: "Scorange"? I don't think so.
  • In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the human William the Bloody (so named for his bloody awful poetry) had a very hard time coming up with a rhyme for effulgent, praising Cecily who was possibly — the experts disagree — actually the vengeance demon Halfrek. The best he could do was bulge in't. Incredibly and ironically enough, the only character known to have liked William's, later Spike's, poetry was Angel. (Which, since Angel also likes Barry Manilow, Spike takes as an insult.)
  • Drake & Josh uses the "orange"/"door hinge" rhyme.
  • Friends:
    • In Emma's Birthday episode, Phoebe tries to sing a song as her gift.
      Emma,
      Your name poses a dilemma,
      'Cause not much else rhymes with Emma
      Maybe the actor Richard Crenna
      (he played the commanding officer in
      Rambo)
      Happy birthday Emma!
    • And in Season 4 with Phoebe's Holiday Song:
      Phoebe: [singing] Happy Chanukah, Monica! May your Christmas be snowy, Joey! Happy New Year, Chandler and Ross. Spin the dreidel, Rachel!
      Rachel: Rachel doesn't rhyme with dreidel.
      Phoebe: Nothing rhymes with your stupid name!
      Joey: Lots of things rhyme with Rachel. Bagel. Mail. Jail. Bail. Able. May-pole.
      Chandler: All good.
  • From Galavant:
    Galavant: Aren't you sugar and spice and everything nice?
    Isabella: Well, aren't you rudeness, and sarcasm and everything... oh...
    Galavant: No, go on. You find something that rhymes with "sarcasm" and makes sense, and I'll take the fall tonight.
  • The Golden Girls: Rose and Dorothy are trying to write a song about Miami for a contest and Rose criticizes Dorothy's lyrics.
    Dorothy: Fine! You find something to rhyme with Miami, hotshot!
    Rose: Mammy! Whammy, clammy, Alabamy, hootenanny, salaminote ...
    Dorothy: "Hootenanny" is marginal, and I refuse to accept "salami"!
  • Horrible Histories sometimes has to find rhymes for words such as "Elagabalus" and "Paleolithic".
  • In one scene in How I Met Your Mother, star cameo Lin-Manuel Miranda raps about how the word "Canada" is apparently unrhymable, only to come up with a rhyme by the end anyway:
    I've just been handed a newsflash — the word Canada is unrhymable
    It's easier to — I don't know — get drunk and try to climb a bull
    But Canada, damn it, I'm scatting mails on the planet
    And watch their stammering stamina
    And as they clamor and cram it into the middle of a sentence
    For a shot at repentance
    Pass the problem on to all their non-rhyming descendants
    I've never met anyone who could clean up after Canada
    Except my uncle Tony from the Bronx
    He's a janitor!
  • In the H.R. Pufnstuf episode "Show Biz Witch", Witchiepoo sings a sings a song in which most of the rhymes are made-up words like "schmoranges".
    Oranges, toranges — who says?
    Oranges, loranges — who says?
    Oranges, smoranges — who says there ain't no rhyme for oranges?
  • The Jeffersons: A songwriter George has hired to write a sing about his wife, Louise (whom he calls Weezy), thinks he has this problem.
    Songwriter: Well, you try finding a rhyme for 'Weezy'! Believe me, it isn't easy!
  • Little Lunch: In "The Top of the Fireman's Pole", Melanie attempts to improvise a song to keep Mrs. Gonsha calm. It is going well until she discovers she doesn't have a rhyme for 'Gonsha'.
  • Scooter's Major General Song listing every guest on The Muppet Show barrels right through an express refusal to even try to rhyme "Mummenschanz".
  • On the Pyramid game show series, Dick Clark would occasionally pull "Words that rhyme with 'orange'" as a joke category.
  • QI:
    • It had an episode with the question "What rhymes with purple?". Alan Davies blurted out random -urple words and ended up getting both right at some point in his rant. The correct answers were, by the way, hirple and curple. Hirple meaning to hobble along on one leg, and curple being the part of a saddle that goes along the horse's stomach (more commonly known as the crupper).
    • They've also asked about orange, providing two answers which are both proper nouns: Blorenge (a town in Wales) and Gorringe (a surname). Rich Hall has also suggested door hinge.
    • In the first series they covered "silver", giving chilver, a ewe lamb.
  • On Seinfeld, Jerry dates a woman but forgets to ask what her name is. Figuring that it's probably too late to ask directly, he tries to trick her into saying it but only learns that it rhymes with a female body part. He and George have a brainstorming session as to what her name might be, leading to guesses like "Celeste", "Bovary", and "Mulva". Eventually she catches on to the fact that Jerry doesn't know her name, and after he makes several incorrect guesses, she breaks up with him. One final name comes to Jerry in a literal moment of Fridge Brilliance and he shouts it out his window to her down on the street: "Dolores!" Her appearance in a later episode confirms that this last guess was correct.
  • Mentioned in A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017), with Count Olaf composing a song:
    Orphans
    Love scatting about orphans
    Nothing rhymes with orphans
    Except for maybe portions
    Oh yeah, or arson
    That's more of like a half-rhyme
    • Also, his henchmen are trying to come up with something to introduce him with for his big performance but admit not a lot of things rhyme with Olaf. He suggests the pilaf rhyme from the books, leading to the troupe chanting "Here comes Count Olaf! Roll out rice pilaf!"
  • Sesame Street had a skit once where Ernie decided to rhyme any word Bert would say. Bert, getting supremely annoyed at one point yells out "HIPPOPOTAMUS!" Ernie pauses for a moment before replying with the completely made-up "ripotatapus."
  • The Suite Life of Zack & Cody: Cody discovers this about a certain undead creature in the most inopportune way possible.
    Carey: Zombie? Did he just say zombie?
    Cody: No, he said... [turns away] mombie, fombie, dombie, lombie... [turns back] I got nothin'.
  • Whose Line Is It Anyway?:
    • From the U.S. version, the "Knocked Over the Christmas Tree" Irish Drinking Song.
      Ryan Stiles: [singing] I put the fire out myself.
      Brad Sherwood: [singing] With a fire extinguisher.
      Wayne Brady: [singing] Then I thought I was finished.
      Colin Mochrie: [singing] Ding-da-ding-da-dingisher.
    • And from the UK series, when the audience shouts out various subjects Josie Lawrence could improvise a song about, Clive Anderson chooses secateurs "for the rhyming possibilities". She glares at him, and proceeds to rhyme it with "sick of tears".
    • And in a Moment of Awesome for Brad Sherwood, he comes up with a love ballad for a college student named Niroshi, with rhymes like "briochee", "Rive Gochee" and "Pacific Oce-ee".
  • In this scene from Wings, Brian tries to win Alex back by improvising a song over the terminal microphone. His plan hits a snag when he realizes "nothing rhymes with Alex." Nevertheless, he gets a round of applause at the end (but doesn't win her back).
  • Wizards vs. Aliens features a magical creature called a hobbledehoy which not only Rhymes on a Dime, it needs others to or it can't understand them. They're mischievous, but you can get one to do your bidding if you get them to break a couplet. Tom does this with an orange; for a while the creature was Genre Savvy enough to simply not put that word at the end of a line, but eventually messes up. It actually would have died after a few minutes if Tom hadn't come up with something to finish the couplet, but fortunately the offending fruit was purchased from a greengrocer named "Mr. Gorringe."
  • Young Blades: When writing a poem about "The" D'Artagnan's exploits, Ramon struggles to find a rhyme for "Constantinople." Rejected ideas: "hope will," "mopeful," and "pope toll."
  • Jeopardy! has had a category called "Almost Rhymes With Purple" several times. Correct responses have included "What is a gerbil?" and "Who is Urkel?".

    Music 
  • The song 9 Coronas, a parody of My Sharona features the line:
    She was no Cindy Crawford
    Cindy Crawford
    Nothing rhymes with Cindy Crawford
    After NINE CORONAS
  • The novelty song "Anna Bananna" outright makes up words to rhyme with bananna.
  • Barenaked Ladies took their own stab at rhyming "orange" in the song "Four Seconds".
    Oh flip, the light is turning orange
    Coat ripped when I caught it in the door hinge
    I slip when the lady in the four-inch
    Bought it in a store in Germany, you wore it...
  • The Bloodhound Gang song "Three Point One Four":
    It's hard to rhyme a
    Word like "vagina"
    Calvin Klein, kinda
    North Carolina
The song is preceded by a spoken word piece in which the singer calls his mother and asks for her help finding words to fit the rhyme. She offers "lima", but suggests he use a different word.
  • After singing "Silly Slang Song", Eric Bogle has been known to remark:
    "I don't claim this the greatest song I've ever written, but it is the only one where I attempt to rhyme 'Schwarzenegger'."note 
  • The Capitol Steps had a song, to Billy Joel's "The Longest Time," in which they lament how "Boris Yeltsin is the hardest rhyme." They explain that they can rhyme "Gorbachev" ("pay our office mortgage off"), "Leningrad" ("pen and pad"), and "Chernenko" ("pinko," appropriately), among others, but Yeltsin gives them trouble. Finally, they decide to give up:
    We can't rhyme Yeltsin
    We'll have to pull our belts in
    Do something else in-
    stead of finding rhymes.
    • More recently, in their John Boehner version of "Loonies of the Right" ("Music of the Night" from Phantom of the Opera),
    "My appeal is that I look quite orange"
    "I just realized that nothing rhymes with 'orange'."
  • Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer manage an effortless-sounding "orange" rhyme in "The River, Where She Sleeps":
    Professor come to burst my bubble
    Says that girl is bound for trouble
    Serves me solace in a paper cup
    But it looks a bit like Agent Orange
    And when he leaves he slams the door and j-
    ust about that time she phones me up
  • Alice Cooper's "School's Out" lampshades this in a verse where they make no effort at rhyming (unlike the other verses):
    Well we got no class
    And we got no principals
    And we got no innocence
    We can't even think of a word that rhymes
  • Eminem's lines are usually stocked with these.
    • Eminem has found so many rhymes for 'orange' that it's almost a signature of his style. The following list is just some of the rhymes he's found for it.
      • "Business":
        Set to blow college dorm room doors off their hinges,
        o-ringes,
        peach, pears, plums, syringes
        (vrinn vrinn!) Yeah, here I come. I'm inches away from you.
      • "Brain Damage" has one of his most famous prestige passages:
        Then I got up and ran to the janitor's storage booth
        Kicked the door hinge loose and ripped out the four-inch screws
        Grabbed some sharp objects, brooms and foreign tools
        This is for every time you took my orange juice
      • "Role Model":
        I'm dumb enough to walk in a store and steal
        So I'm dumb enough to ask for a date with Lauryn Hill
        Some people only see that I'm white, ignorin' skill
        'Cause I stand out like a green hat with a orange bill
      • In "Brainless" he lists all the stuff he keeps in his skull other than a brain:
        Still, in my skull’s a vacant empty void
        been usin' it more as a bin for storage
        In this gourd
        there's: a Ford engine,
        door hinge,
        syringe,
        an orange,
        an extension cord,
        and a ninja sword
      • In "3 6 5":
        You know you're spaced the fuck out like George Lucas
        when your puke is
        turning to yellowish-orange mucus
      • He once explained how he would "bend the word", rhyming it through extending the enunciation of the syllables, in a 60 Minutes interview:
        Eminem: People say the word 'orange' doesn't rhyme with anything, and that kind of pisses me off. [...] I put my orange four-inch door hinge in storage and ate porridge with Geor-ge.
      • Parodied in "Tone Deaf", where he brags that he can make "orange" rhyme with "banana"... "orrrr... na-na".
    • "Venom" is pretty infamously built on rhyming 'venom' with 'adrenaline' and 'momentum' by putting emphasis on the consonants/assonance rather than a conventional vowel rhyme.
    • Eminem also likes rhyming with noises:
      • In "Square Dance" he rhymes with disc scratching sounds:
      So follow me as I put these crayons to chaos
      From seance to seance (ourr-e-ourr-e-eeourr)
      • In "Without Me" he rhymes with a line from the Batman (1966) theme:
      Well, I'm back, na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na
      (kshhhh!), fix ya bent antenna, tune it in and then I'm gonna...
      • In "Vegas" he rhymes "the freakin' Exorcist" with the Jason Voorhees noise from Friday the 13th ("ch-ch-ch-ch-ch!!").
      • His 2018 Kick Off freestyle has him rhyme with the sound of him spitting.
      Battle me and win? That's a fuckin fallacy too.
      You name one motherfucker in this galaxy, ptoo
    • In "A Kiss", Em finished a line with the word "truculent", in a verse to be finished by Royce Da 5'9", entirely to annoy him. His reaction was (apparently) "thanks a lot"; Royce eventually managed to come up with "oven mitts".
    • "Discombobulated" was possibly written because Google's top answer for "words without rhymes" suggests 'discombobulate'. Eminem rhymes it with "Miss, you ovulating?" and "piss you off, my lady".
  • The Flaming Lips manage to work an "orange" rhyme into "She Don't Use Jelly" by dropping a syllable:
    But she don't use nothin' that you buy at the store
    She likes her hair to be real or'nge
  • Flanders and Swann on the difficulty of writing songs about Russian politics:
    We were never able to come up with a rhyme for "Khrushchev" until he'd gone: "Did he fall, or was he pusch off?"
  • Rich Hall (in character as country singer Otis Lee Crenshaw):
    Now the mountain trees are rustling and the sun is sinking orange
    And I'd like to make a rhyme right now but I've painted myself into a corner
  • "You're The 1Z" by Hannah Hart and Dave Days:
    Carrots have a green stem
    Could be a butch or a femme
    You see carrots are orange
    And that is so... strehnge?
    Um... chorus!
  • Humpty Hump and the Digital Underground got around this by simply making words up, and freely acknowledging it in-song
    I shoot an arrow like Cupid
    I say a word that don't mean nothin'
    Like Loopdid.
  • "Wem nutzt das schon" by German fun metal band JBO plays with this trope - although they DO find rhymes on assorted celebs they lament that those rhymes are pointless and unfitting.
  • The King Blues song "Set the World on Fire" starts by rhyming "orange" with "lozenge".
    I wake up in the morning and take big pharma' lozenges,
    Swallowing the juice of Israeli blood oranges
  • Tom Lehrer worked his way around this:
    Eating an orange
    While making love
    Makes for bizarre enj-
    oyment thereof.
  • The extremely sarcastic (and deliberately offensive) song "Let's Go Bomb an Abortion Clinic" has a tough time, since "cynic" is just about the only English word that rhymes with "clinic."
    Let's go bomb an abortion clinic,
    Make the world once more Huckleberry Finn-ic
    ... While they're still inside with their next-of-kin-ic
    ... We'll keep them from committing a mortal sin — ick!
  • Roger Miller in "Dang Me":
    They say roses are red and violets are purple
    Sugar's sweet, so's maple syr'ple.
  • Pepper Coyote's song "Driving into the Sun" manages to pull off rhyming with "orange" fairly organically.
    Reaching above for a square on a hinge
    Swinging it down, try to block the orange
    ball of sweaty wet light in my eyes it will run
    As I find myself driving into the sun
  • The bonus track on Relient K's album Two Lefts Don't Make a Right introduces "the worst freestyle rapper ever":
    Apples are green and carrots are orange
    And then they go and then you go
    What nothing, what oh what rhymes with orange?
    Oh geez, I really am bad.
  • Songdrops has "The Color Song", which encourages kids to name the colors that rhyme with different words. Guess what rhymes with "burple", "Wilbur" and "door hinge"?
  • The Steve Miller Band does this kind of scheme at one point in "Take the Money and Run":
    Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas
    You know he knows just exactly what the facts is
    He ain't gonna let those two escape justice
    He makes his livin' off of the people's taxes
  • An obscure They Might Be Giants spoken word piece called "Trucker's Coffee" rhymes "orange" and "door hinge".
  • In "Staight Razor Cabaret" by Voltaire, "straight razor" is paired with "face raper." His Youtube page reveals that this is because it was the only thing he could think of that rhymed... and basically said, "Oh, well." when it was pointed out to him that it doesn't rhyme at all.
  • Bodo Wartke, a german singer and songwriter, wrote the song "Da muss er durch", where he tries to rhyme the german word "durch" without resorting to the one, obvious solution "Lurch". In the end he is forced to fall back on "Lurch" but not without many attempts to find a proper alternative. (Including some Refuge in Audacity when his bet partner insists that his rhymes are mostly unclean and "it has to be written the same at the end if it shall rhyme". So he rhymes it on church.)
  • Worm Quartet has a song about this, "Great Idea for a Song," in which a disgruntled songwriter laments the fact that his ex-girl's name doesn't rhyme with any good insults.
    Oh, if only your name rhymed with "sadistic lying bitch,"
    I'd have a great idea for a song.
  • An unwritten rule for "Weird Al" Yankovic is never repeating a rhyme word in the next verse, even if the source material does so. He somehow manages four different rhymes to the "Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota".

    Print Media 
  • Games Magazine published a series of columns in which a linguist successively attempted to rhyme orange, silver and purple. The words he found included chilver (a female lamb) and hirple (to walk with a limp).

    Puppet Shows 
  • Fraggle Rock:
    • In the episode "I Want To Be You," Mokey, while writing a poem called "Ode to Radishes," is having trouble finding a rhyme for "gurgles." Her finished poem reads:
      Little radish by a tree,
      Growing reddish silently.
      Reddish radish, brook that gurgles,
      Garden path where life unfurgles.
    • In the episode "A Tune For Two," Gobo has this trouble while trying to write a song for the Duet-a-thon, a contest to see who can sing the best duet.
      Wembley: [running in] Gobo, Gobo, Gobo, Gobo, Gobo! I don't know what we're gonna sing in the Duet-a-thon! What should I do?
      Gobo: Well, you can help me find a word that rhymes with "treacherous."
      Wembley: Oh, yeah! Why didn't I think of that? Let's see... uh... "treacherous." [Mumbles a few words to himself.] I got it, I got it, I got it, I got it! "Bletcherous."
      Gobo: Oh, Wembley, "bletcherous" isn't a word.
      Wembley: It's not?

    Radio 
  • In the Cabin Pressure episode "Limerick", while making up a limerick to pass time on a long cargo flight, Douglas chooses to mention the British town of Stroud rather than their actual location over the Russian town of Vyshny Volochyok on the basis that he cannot make the latter rhyme or scan. Arthur takes this as a challenge and comes up with three rhymes: "fish-free oboe check", "drizzly, solo trek" and "miss my polo neck." Douglas is not impressed.
  • Hello Cheeky did one or two comedy songs every episode. One of them, I've Fallen For A Girl Called Agnes, has no steady rhythm as the singer can't think of a rhyme for Agnes.
    I've fallen for a girl called Agnes
    And nothing rhymes with that
    And so I'll sing my song of love the best way that I can
    Each time I see beloved Agnes
    Birds sing in my heart, and in my bathroom as well
    I think they get in through a hole in the roof
  • In one episode of Just a Minute, Stephen Fry says that he like words that don't rhyme with others, listing "silver" and "orange". Paul Merton challenges and suggests "door hinge" as a rhyme for orange. In another episode, Sue Perkins says that nothing rhymes with the word "month", which is followed by this exchange:
    Marcus Brigstocke: That's not technically true. My brother has a lisp and he doesn't like the people he works with...
    [audience laughter]
    Paul Merton: Nicholas, whatever you do, don't explain the joke.
  • In the final episode of the first series of Mitch Benn's Crimes Against Music, he and Richard Stilgoe are having a satirical song contest; when Stilgoe challenges Benn to continue the song "I went to the supermarket and there I bought an orange", Mitch melts. But he later comes back:
    Everybody knows ain't nothing rhymes with orange
    Doesn't matter how much imagination or ing-
    enuity you use, even words that are foreign j-
    ust better let it go, ain't nothing rhymes with orange
    • This is the same Mitch Benn who found a rhyme for 'iambic pentameter'. ("Using my skills and my talents with grammar ta/ Kick yo' ass in iambic pentameter")

    Theater 
  • In The Complete History Of America Abridged, a 1960s protest chant parodying Green Eggs and Ham suddenly grinds to a halt due to the impossibility of rhyming "Agent Orange."
  • The List Song "A Rhyme For Angela" from The Firebrand Of Florence by Ira Gershwin:
    Cornelia and Aurelia,
    Cecilia and Ophelia,
    Inspired lovely lyrics from my pen —
    But Angela is something else again.
  • Infamous in "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General" from The Pirates of Penzance:
    Major-General Stanley: [singing] In short, when I've a smattering of elemental strategy... [spoken] Strategy, hm, that's a tough one...Ah! [resumes singing] You'll say a better Major-General has never sat a gee!note 
    • Since the stage directions only say "the Major-General struggles for a rhyme" between each verse, directors have had a lot of fun with this. Commonly the cast stops for a bit to think, and at least one show had the conductor shout out the line.
    • More than that, since we are now several decades beyond the point where audiences could be expected to know what "sat a gee" means and the Maj-Gen does not, in the original, say "rode a horse" at any point. So he may now, for example, think for a bit, then just give up and declare "...rode a horse!", inspiring one of his daughters to run across and stage-whisper "sat a gee" in his ear; only then does he sing it.
  • From the final song in Something Rotten!:
    Welcome to America!
    Where nothing rhymes with America!
  • Parodied in The Spongebob Musical when Patrick somehow struggles to rhyme the word "rock" during the opening number. SpongeBob informs him that several words do rhyme with "rock."
  • Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, "A Little Priest":
    Mrs. Lovett: We've got tinker...
    Todd: No, no, something pinker.
    Mrs. Lovett: Tailor?
    Todd: Paler.
    Mrs. Lovett: Butler?
    Todd: Subtler.
    Mrs. Lovett: Potter?
    Todd: Hotter.
    Mrs. Lovett: Locksmith?
    (Silence)
  • The song "Popular" from Wicked has Galinda getting her rhyme scheme interrupted, and improvises by pronouncing it as "Popu... lar?" (as in are). Specifically:
    Galinda: To be who you'll be, instead of dreary who you were — well, are.
    There's nothing that can stop you from becoming populer. [Beat] Lar.

    Video Games 
  • Axiom Verge: The weapons "Voranj" and "Kilver" were coined to rhyme with two of the classic unrhymables.
  • In one banter dialogue in Baldur's Gate 2, gnomish trickster Jan Jansen mentions to the bard Haer'Dalis that he's trying to write some poetry and needs some help. Specifically, he needs rhymes for orange, silver and purple. Haer'Dalis does not fall for it.
  • One of Fruit Ninja's Fruit Facts shown after each round of the game: "Nothing rhymes with orange."
  • An earlier version of one quest in Kingdom of Loathing featured a rhyming demon who kept accidentally ending his sentences with unrhymeable words.
    Brimstone is red,
    Magma is orange.
    Azazel wants to see you, um... wait... crap... sorry, I'm still not very good at this.
  • Pony Fantasy VI:
    • Zecora's last words result in her about to rhyme something with the word "orange." "Fortunately," Discord kills her before she can finish.
    • Minty Fresh Adventure pulls something similar with Zecora: one of the bonus scenes between Colgate and Zecora (which can seen if Colgate knocks on Zecora's door enough times) has Colgate trick Zecora into ending a line with the word "orange", which majorly pisses off Zecora.
  • The Curse of Monkey Island: Guybrush is trying to get his crew of pirates to stop singing, but they keep finding ways to rhyme with what he says. Then he hits them with this:
    Guybrush: We'll surely avoid scurvy if we all eat an orange.
    Haggis: And...! ...um...
    Bill: Well...?
    Edward: ...err...
    Bill: Door hinge?
    Edward: No, no...
    Bill: Guess the song's over, then.
    Haggis: Guess so.
    Edward: (sighs) Okay, back to work.
    Guybrush: Well, gee. I feel a little guilty, now.
  • Parodied in Limerick Quest. All the game's text is written in limericks. Dialogue options are used as the start of the next limerick. If you pick a line that ends in a hard-to-rhyme word, like "chutzpah", the game acknowledges how hard it is to rhyme. Saying "orange" results in a game over when your brain literally melts from how bad the resulting rhyme is:
    "What color's the egg? Is it orange?
    Will I have to oil a door hinge?
    I have some concerns:
    Will we need these ferns
    to discharge the spores from their sporange?"

    Those questions, so wild and inane!
    Those end words, so forced and arcane!
    The strength of this crime
    against nature and rhyme
    has lit'rally melted your brain.
  • The first Pajama Sam has a minigame based around mixing potions from combinations of seven colours in certain orders. Only one potion requires you to end on Orange, which the rhyming potion recipe book says will "make you squeak just like a door-hinge". Another recipe cheats a bit by rhyming purple with "burp'll".

    Webcomics 
  • In a guest Captain SNES: The Game Masta comic, Alex has run into a narrator-slash-censor forcing everyone to rhyme. He remarks, "Orange is too cliche... how about film?" The narrator then reveals its looseness with rhymes: "Might I suggest you try out 'Dark Realm'?"
  • In one strip of Lackadaisy, Ivy is chewing out a bedridden Viktor for scaring off her previous boyfriends. He tries to justify it by saying that Chad was "Bad," Claude was "Flawed," and Cecil...
    Ivy: Oh, don't bother answering that. Nothing rhymes with Cecil anyway.
    Viktor: Terrible name. And also he vas no good.
  • In page 238 of the webcomic The Order of the Stick, Elan's attempt to persuade the inn patrons in the eatery via bard song which consisted entirely of rhymes. Elan combines the word "grass'n" to create a rhyme for assassin — something noted by the author, who titled that page "You Try Rhyming 'Assassin'". In addition, he also paused briefly in the middle of the next stanza when trying to think of a word that rhymes with "wooden", in a sentence which implies a promise that his group would do for the patrons if they complied with his request to leave the inn.
  • In Ozy and Millie, Llewellyn invented the "authentic Llewellyn-brand borange" just so that orange would have a rhyme. He's a bit unclear about what exactly it does.
  • Parisa: When Luciano Jones and Dr. Wyrm list the things their minions misplaced in rhyme, they get stuck at the word "orange".
  • In this strip of Penny Arcade, Tycho is trying to tell Gabe about some gaming-news or other, but Gabe keeps replying with "Chicken -rhyme-". Of course, he's a fool to challenge Tycho's expansive vocabulary, and sure enough, Tycho proceeds to state "I might even... acquiesce." Causing Gabe to collapse convulsing as his brain attempts the impossible task of rhyming with it...
  • Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: The Alt Text for "Happy 2" claims that the author made the comic to show that he can rhyme "inchoate". It rhymed with "If you're happy and you know it." It Makes Sense in Context.
  • In Sheldon, Arthur uses it as a cure for a strange disease that makes people talk in rhymes. Blunt like that.
  • An inventor in 6 Gun Mage names his machine "The Gorange" because nothing rhymes with orange. "But now they have to say 'Except the gorange.' The marketing writes itself."

    Web Original 
  • Lampshaded in one episode of The Annoying Orange where a banana mentions there are no words that rhyme with banana. Orange doesn't think so, though.
  • There's a quiz on Sporcle about filling in blanks with "dubious rhymes for purple." Very dubious. Sporcle itself is one. The quiz is quite funny, though.
  • In the Epic Rap Battles of History episode Steven Spielberg vs. Alfred Hitchcock vs. Quentin Tarantino vs. Stanley Kubrick vs. Michael Bay this was managed to be averted. Stanley Kubrick managed to rhyme "purple" with "turtles".
  • In an episode of Ukinojoe's animated series, Great: The Show, it is suggested that orange rhymes with purple. Because they both rhyme with "nothing."
  • On the Limerick DB (essentially a clone of bash.org, for limericks), one of the top 150 limericks is this:
    There once was a small juicy orange,
    ...fuck.
  • The Nostalgia Critic:
    • As he bursts in a Mary Poppins parody at the end of his Batman & Robin:
      Iiit's... Supercrapafuckarifficexpialibullshit
      A film so bad that censors really oughta go and pull it.
      Sadly there's not many words that only rhyme with bullshit!...
    • He gets stuck on "oranges" when he tries to rap along with Bébé's Kids.
  • SCP 904 from the SCP Foundation is a memetic hazard related to writing on a bathroom stall that causes an individual to uncontrollably rhyme whenever they speak. While the effect usually wears off in 24 hours, it can persist permanently and the effect can grow to the point where the individual can rhyme in superior methods but begin hallucinating. The biggest problem comes when rhyming words that have little to no rhymes (such as the word "ninth" as the article says). While the article does not specify the effects of failing to rhyme, it does note that cleaning up the blood afterwards is incredibly difficult.
  • Lindsay Ellis in reviewing Bright brings in The Rap Critic to provide song accompaniment. The difficult rhyme in question is "orc cop", and after providing "pork chops", "short stop" and "sure shot", he concedes "Not a lot rhymes with orc cop".
  • Played straight at the end of one of the Recap Rap videos by The Warp Zone. The singer (Ryan Tellez) practices some rhymes.
    Red. Dead.
    Yellow. Mellow.
    Orange.... F**k!
  • Red vs. Blue had in the Musical Episode the reason why the rocket launcher could not be referred to as such being "nothing rhymes with launcher!" And in the song "Bow Chicka Bow Wow", Tucker shows using the show's original setting brings up this:
    I'm so alone out in this canyon
    Not one single girl in this canyon
    Or anything rhyming with canyon
    So come and see me if you need a new man-yon
  • In this Tumblr thread, a debate on the classic "roses are red, violets are blue" poem regarding why violets are being referred to as blue is eventually ended by someone Stating the Simple Solution: nothing actually rhymes with "purple". Then someone posts a couple of words that do rhyme with purple, and someone else re-writes the poem using one of them. The result?
    "Roses are red, violets are purple,
    My boner for you has caused me to hirplenote ."
    ...
    My, how romantic!
  • The postscript to the Walk Off the Earth video for their cover of Cheerleader gets briefly derailed when they can't find a rhyme for "Spotify".
  • On Valentines Day 2017, Waterstones bookshop posted various authors' versions of Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue... on their blog. Natalie Haynes came up with:
    Roses are red
    Violets are purple
    People just say they're blue
    Cos rhyming's a hurdle.
  • Cinematic Excrement had once this parody of "Because I Got High":
    I was gonna write a song for the credits,
    But then I got high
    I tried to find a word that rhymes with credits,
    But then I got high (Yeah, rhyming is hard!)

    Western Animation 
  • Referenced by Animaniacs in a "Dot's Poetry Corner" skit, where she's riffing on "Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue..." and how "violets are violet, violets aren't blue!" She ends with:
    When we call something blue when it's not, we defile it.
    But aw, what the heck, it's hard to rhyme "violet"!
  • Arthur:
    • In one episode, Binky has a dream where everyone speaks in rhyme. They are threatened by a monstrous "purple orange". It is even lampshaded at one point that it "has no rhyme".
      • Binky’s curse of needing to rhyme everything is broken when speaking with Arthur, whose name is unrhymable.
    • There is one episode where a kid is heard asking another kid what rhymes with "orange".
    • In one episode one of Arthur's friends is talking through a ventriloquist dummy as he paints and tries to find a rhyme for "orange". After Arthur reminds him one does not exist, he moves on to yellow.
  • In an episode of Bubble Guppies, Deema tries to say rhyming words each time, but fails when it comes to "orange".
    Deema: Eh... Nothing rhymes with orange.
  • An old promo for NBC's The Bullwinkle Show uses this.
    Rocky: Watch The Bullwinkle Show!
    Bullwinkle: Yeah, because "Bullwinkle" rhymes with...Uh...Couldn't we just call it The Clyde Show?
  • Danny Phantom:
    • Exploited in the Christmas Episode ("The Fright Before Christmas"): Danny manages to temporarily derail Ghost Writer's reality-writing Christmas poem by grabbing an orange, which the Ghost Writer realizes too late that he can't rhyme with anything. The episode, by the way, ends with Walker taunting Ghost Writer (now safely imprisoned in Ghost Jail) by offering him an orange.
    • In "Phantom Planet", after Danny is being smoked by Vlad's new ghost-hunting team, Masters' Blasters, Tucker thinks it might help if he came up with a slogan. Unfortunately, Tucker soon realizes that finding a word that rhymes with "Phantom" is no easy task.
  • The Deep (2015): In "The Dark Orca", Ant invents a backpack that allows him to carry Jeffrey around above water. He names his new invention the 'jorange'. Why? So that way he has invented two things: a backpack aquarium, and a word that rhymes with orange.
  • There's a first-season episode of Drawn Together that has Foxy give the cast a "sex ed" talk as if she were a Misplaced Kindergarten Teacher and the rest of the cast (obligingly) act like kindergarteners. She rhymes the various parts of the reproductive anatomy, until she gets to vagina, calling it a "gigi" which in her words "rhymes with puppy... but not very well."
  • The Futurama episode "Fry and the Slurm Factory" parodies the Oompa-Loompa song, exaggerating their use of meaningless made-up words to fill in rhymes:
    Grunka Lunkas: Grunka Lunka dunkity dingredient,
    you should not ask about the secret ingredient.
    Bender: Ok, ok. We get the point.
    Leela: I was just curious because of the armed guards.
    Grunka Lunkas: Grunka Lunka dunkity darmedguards...
    Bender: Shut the hell up!
  • The Musical Episode of Kappa Mikey has the each of the main characters singing a song about themselves. Guano, who is a purple creature, sings a song titled "Nothing Rhymes With Purple" about his loneliness.
  • In the episode of Miraculous Ladybug "Frightningale", featuring the episode-naming villain that petrifies anyone hit with her whip that fails to dance and rhyme, Frightningale tries to goad Cat Noir into saying a hard to rhyme word, "hundred". Ladybug interrupts him before he could say it. Later on, he needed help finding a rhyme for "Cataclysm" a power he activates by saying it.
  • In the My Little Pony Tales episode "Battle Of The Bands", Melody is writing a song and claims she is stuck because she can't find a word that rhymes with orange. Her mom says it's because there is none, and as soon as Melody wonders if it's true, her siblings call her to see something on TV.
  • The Owl House features a mysterious villain known as The Collector who, in "Hollow Mind," struggles to come up with a rhyme for "Unity" when teasing Emperor Belos about his plans of genocide.
  • Phineas and Ferb:
    • In the episode "Does This Duckbill Make Me Look Fat?" Doofenshmirtz tries to write his own evil jingle to replace a fast food jingle, but can't come up with any good rhymes for evil:
      "Believe me, I've tried. Keevil, deevil, feevil...you know, none of these are words."
    • Subverted in the Across the 2nd Dimension song Kick It Up a Notch, in which Doofenshmirtz's counterpart successfully comes up with a couple of rhymes for evil for his verse in the song:.
      Doof-2: Yeah I'm cranking up the evil
      Cause political upheaval
      Yeah I'm gonna get medieval on you!
    • The episode "Great Balls of Water" has Candace effortlessly attempt rhyming "orange"
      Candace: Take a little time to really decorate my door, and
      Change my hair to black and then I'll dye it back to orange,
  • The Color Kids in Rainbow Brite each have an alliterative name, a name that is a pun, or a name that is a reference to the particular color they represent. Everyone except for Lala Orange that is.
  • The Simpsons:
    • In "A Streetcar Named Marge", Homer is watching a 'Miss America' pageant on TV and shouting out rhymes for the states, until one stumps him. "Miss South Carolina!" "Nothing could be finer!" "Miss Delaware!" "Uh, um, uh... Good for her!"
    • In "The Nedliest Catch", Ned gives Edna a presentation card saying "If you got the time, I've got the rhyme!" And he was able to rhyme anything she said until she mentioned it is printed in orange.
  • What's with Andy?: An episode found Andy in a bet with his sister Jen that he could keep rhyming for 24 hours. He manages it until a crucial moment when his sister tricks him into saying the word "orange". At first it looks like he's stumped, until he see a "door hinge" and pulls through.
    • In the same episode, Jen also tried to get Andy with "raisin" and "month", but Andy, ever the clever one, gets away by using "phrasin'" and a lisped "dunce", respectively.
    • "Zawias" is Polish for "door hinge", so the Polish dub replaced "orange" with "nawias" (which means "bracket"), a similarly difficult word to rhyme.
    • The Dutch dub replaced the word with "Twaalf" (Dutch for "twelve").
    • Russian replaced an orange with a papaya, which is an example of a bad Woolseyism because there are a lot of words rhyming with papaya in Russian.
  • In the Grand Finale of WordGirl, "Rhyme and Reason", Rhyme, who speaks in rhyme, keeps using her ice breath to freeze WordGirl. At one point, Violet appears and tells Rhyme to "Stop freezing her! Or she may turn... purple!" Rhyme attempts to come up with a rhyme for the word "purple" but has a hard time doing so, giving WordGirl enough time to free herself from the ice.
  • In Trolls: Holiday in Harmony, Tiny Diamond sorts his father, Guy Diamond, for the secret gift exchange, and decides to give him a special rap... only for him to struggle to find a rhyme for "diamond".

    Real Life 
  • Just to satisfy the nitpickers, yes there actually are rhymes for many of these words, though typically only one. For example, silver has chilver, a female lamb, while orange gets "sporange", a botanical term. Orange has another, thanks to Wales: Blorenge.
  • A "purple nurple", the act of twisting a person's nipple until it turns purple (usually considered a school prank), obviously got the name by changing "nipple" into a "word" that rhymes with "purple".
  • Averted in French, where orange can rhyme with, according to this forum thread, "range (clean up), mange (eat), fange (scum/mud), qu'entends-je (what do I hear?), change (change), ange (angel), phalange (phalanx), challenge (same as in Englishnote ), le Gange (the Ganges), le jambon de Madrange (Madrange ham), engrange (reap)..."
  • Ironically, the Hebrew word for 'orange' rhymes with the Hebrew word for 'Rhyme'.
  • The Scots word "Hirple" means "to walk with a limp."
    Roses are Red
    Violets are purple
    My sore leg
    Causes me to hirple.

 
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Video Example(s):

Alternative Title(s): Nothing Rhymes With Orange

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"We'll surely avoid scurvy..."

Despite Guybrush's best efforts, he can't get his crew to stop singing and get back to work, since they find ways to rhyme with his protests... up until Guybrush hits them with the word "orange" which lets the air right out of their collective balloon, leaving him feeling slightly guilty.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (13 votes)

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Main / LeastRhymableWord

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