Quiz: How Many Words That Rhyme With "Bed" Can You Name in Two Minutes or Less?

How are your rhyming skills doing? Whether you’re honing your songwriting and poetry abilities or just looking to give your brain a little exercise, this challenge is for you. See how many one-syllable words you can rhyme with “bed” in the quiz below!

How many did you get right? You’re forgiven if you missed a few. Hopefully you’ve come away with some more ideas if you ever need to think up some excellent rhymes for bed or some of the many words that rhyme with it. 

What’s in a rhyme?

Merriam-Webster defines “rhyme” as “a correspondence in terminal sounds of units of composition or utterance (such as two or more words or lines of verse).” The word “rhyme” comes from the Middle English ryme, which in turn comes from the Anglo-French.

There are a number of different types of rhymes. A “perfect rhyme” is “when the final syllable of two rhyming words is identical,” per Scribbr. This can include words like “cat” and “hat,” or two-syllable words with differing stressed syllables like “sister” and “blister.”

A “slant rhyme,” also known as a “half rhyme” or “near rhyme,” is a kind of rhyme in which “either the vowels or the consonants of stressed syllables are identical,” per Dictionary.com. This might include “eyes” and “light,” or “years” and “yours.” An “eye rhyme,” meanwhile, is a pair of words that look like they should rhyme—usually because of similar spellings—but actually don’t rhyme. This includes words such as “move” and “love.”

The benefits of rhyming

People have been rhyming for thousands of years. Rhymes are satisfying to the human ear, and they can also help improve memory and reading skills. 

There’s a reason why phrases like “Columbus sailed the ocean blue / in 1492” are so much easier to remember than something like “Columbus sailed in 1492.” Rhymes help people memorize things through acoustic encoding, a fancy way of describing how our brains remember things through patterns we hear. Technically, rhymes are mnemonics, which are tools that help people remember things better. The word mnemonics is derived from the Greek word for memory. 

Rhymes can also help prepare young kids for reading, which is one reason why rhyming stories are so popular in early childhood education. There’s also the fact that rhymes are simply more entertaining and fun for kids than regular old prose.

Clearly, humans’ love for rhymes has no age limit. Most popular songs feature rhyming lyrics, and so do many popular catchphrases and slogans. It's never a bad idea to take some time to rhyme!