Holorime


Holorhyme is a form of rhyme where two very similar sequence of sounds can form phrases composed of slightly or completely different words and with different meanings. For example, in some British English dialects, the following lines are pronounced identically:

In French

In French poetry, rime richissime is a rhyme of more than three phonemes. A holorime is an extreme example. For example :
Another notable French exponent of the holorime was Alphonse Allais:
French lends itself to humorous wordplay because of its large number of heterographic homophones:

In Japanese

A type of holorime where the meaning changes based on where word boundaries are placed in the phrase is known as ginatayomi in Japanese. The word itself is a ginatayomi, since it arises from a misreading:
These words are consequently also known as Benkei-yomi. Another famous example:

Other examples

Holorime may also refer to two phrases that sound the same but have different meanings. Most such holorimes come from music lyrics, such as mishearing "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" as "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy."