Orange, Purple, and Month Actually Do Rhyme

For decades, schoolteachers and trivia enthusiasts have confidently declared that nothing rhymes with orange, purple, or month. It's one of those "facts" that gets repeated so often it becomes gospel. There's just one problem: it's not true.

These words aren't rhymeless—they're just extraordinarily picky about their rhyming partners.

Orange's Botanical Buddy

The word sporange is the only perfect rhyme for orange in English. It's an old botanical term for sporangium, the part of a fern where asexual spores are created. Not exactly cocktail party vocabulary, which explains why most people don't know it exists.

There's also Blorenge, the name of a mountain in Wales. Proper nouns count if you're desperate to finish that rhyming couplet.

Purple's Scottish Cousins

Purple rhymes with curple, an obscure term for a horse's hindquarters. It's also an old Scots word for the leather strap that goes under a horse's tail to keep the saddle in place—and more generally, it means "buttocks."

Then there's hirple, which means to limp or walk awkwardly. Both words have Scottish origins, which explains why they've remained on the fringes of modern English.

Month Meets Math

Month rhymes with oneth, derived from the mathematical expression "n+1th" (as in "thousand and oneth"). There's also granth, a Hindi word meaning book—specifically, a Sikh holy text.

Why the Myth Persists

Linguists call these "refractory rhymes"—words with rhyming partners so rare that they're functionally unrhymable for practical purposes. When's the last time you needed to discuss sporanges and oranges in verse?

The real lesson here isn't about rhyme—it's about how easily "common knowledge" can be wrong. These words have been rhyming quietly in dictionaries for centuries while everyone insisted they couldn't be rhymed. Sometimes the most interesting facts are the ones that debunk the facts we thought we knew.