RunCabin Blog · Built with the connector

A rhyming dictionary that searches by sound, not spelling

July 3, 2026 · 5 min read

This one is for the poets. And the songwriters, and the rappers, and anyone who has ever stared at a rhyming dictionary's list and thought: that is not what I asked. We built Technical Rhymer - a free rhyming dictionary that searches the sounds themselves - and then we published it in the laziest way imaginable, which happens to be the way we built RunCabin for: we asked Claude to do it.

The gap in rhyming dictionaries

Rhyme lives in pronunciation, and English spelling is a famously unreliable witness to it. Colonel rhymes with kernel. Through rhymes with threw. Cough, though, and tough agree on almost nothing. Every serious rhyming tool already knows this - under the hood, they all match on phonetics.

But almost none of them let you touch the phonetics. You type a word, you get a list, and that is the whole interface. If the list is not what your line needs - too strict, too loose, wrong stress, no slang - there is no dial to turn. The sound layer that decides everything is hidden from the one person who actually thinks in sounds: the writer.

That is the gap. Technical Rhymer's whole design is one move: hand the sound layer to the writer.

What searching by sound looks like

Look up a word and you get its pronunciation as phonemes - orange is AO R AH N JH in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary's ARPABET notation. Now the interesting part: that pronunciation is a search query you can edit. Keep the tail, drop a sound, and search - every word whose pronunciation ends the same way comes back, ranked by how common the word actually is, so usable rhymes surface first and the exotic stuff waits at the bottom.

From there it gets properly technical, in the way lyricists are secretly technical:

• Match sounds in order or any order. AO R * JH finds words with those sounds in sequence, with anything between. AO R | JH finds them in any order.
• Double rhymes get their own section. Words where the rhyme lands twice - rat-a-tat, at-bat - are split out with a multiplier badge, because a repeated rhyme is usually the better find.
• Fuzzy matching for slant rhymes. Turn it on and like-sounding consonants match - grouped by how they are made in the mouth, so t matches k but not d. Vowels never fuzz, because vowels are the rhyme.
• A phoneme keyboard. Every sound in English as a tappable key with an example word, so you never have to memorize notation to build a query.
• Rhymes about something. An optional AI filter keeps only results related to a word you name - searching the -easure tail while writing about pirates keeps treasure. It is free and needs no key or account.
• Slang and the new stuff. Beyond ~135,000 standard words, it indexes the 10,000 top-rated Urban Dictionary terms and 2,000 new words of the 2020s - so rizz, sigma male, and doomscrolling have rhymes too, honestly labeled with approximate pronunciations.

Every search syncs to the address bar, so a query is a shareable link. Your settings stick between visits. The full design rationale - why phonemes, why frequency ranking, where the data comes from - is on the site's about page.

The part where we said "hey Claude, publish it"

Here is the RunCabin part of the story. The entire site - the phoneme search, the dictionary pipelines, the fuzzy-matching rules, the AI filter - was built in Claude Code, in conversation with an agent. When it was done, putting it online was one sentence:

"Hey Claude - publish my site with the runcabin.com MCP."

Badaboom. The agent created the site through RunCabin's MCP connector, deployed the pages, uploaded about 15 MB of dictionary data, and handed back a live HTTPS URL. The custom domain was one checkout link later - the agent found technicalrhymer.org, priced it, and handed over a checkout page to approve. Registration, DNS, and the security certificate happened on their own. Nobody opened a hosting dashboard at any point. And like every domain bought through RunCabin, it belongs to the buyer: cancel someday and we release it to you, transfer code included.

We built the connector precisely so that "the AI made me a thing" can end with "and now it is online" instead of a zip file. Using it to ship our own side project is the most honest product demo we know how to run.

Questions people ask

Is Technical Rhymer free?

Yes - free, no account, no sign-up, no tracking. Even the AI word-sense filter is free to use; it runs through a rate-limited relay, so there is no API key to bring.

How is this different from a normal rhyming dictionary?

A normal rhyming dictionary takes a word and returns a fixed list. Technical Rhymer lets you search the sound layer directly - tails, patterns, repeats, and near-matches - and then filter by meaning. It is the difference between ordering off a menu and being handed the kitchen.

Does it know modern slang?

Yes - the Urban Dictionary top 10,000 plus 2,000 new words of the 2020s, with approximate machine-generated pronunciations, clearly badged as such.

We built this for the poets, so we'll close the way they do:
the tool is live, the rhymes are free - the next line's up to you.

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Related reading: how to publish a website from Claude · what an AI-editable website is