What one and two syllable English words are hard to rhyme?

In _The Poet's Craft Book_, Clement Wood defines "rhyme" thus:

    Rhyme is the identity in sound of an accented vowel in a word,
    usually the last one accented, and of all consonantal and vowel
    sounds following it; with a difference in the sound of the
    consonant immediately preceding the accented vowel.

A few pages later Wood says:

    If a poet commences,

            October is the wildest month,
            
    he has estopped himself from any rhyme; since "month" has no rhyme
    in English.

"Month," "silver," and "orange" are frequently cited as words that
cannot be rhymed.  But this is not so.  Below is a list of words that
are difficult to rhyme, but that have either true rhymes that are rare
words or vowel rhymes.  Vowel rhyme (or "assonance") consists of
identity of final accented vowel sound, with dissimilarity of
subsequent consonantal and unaccented vowel sounds.


Word            Rhyme                                   Assonance
--------------- --------------------------------------- --------------
aitch           brache [NI2+], taich [NI2+]             naish
angry           unangry [NI2+]                          aggry
angst                                                   lanx
beards          weirds
breadth                                                 death
bulb                                                    pulp
carpet          charpit
chimney         timne, polymny [NI2+]
cusp            wusp [NI2]                              bust
depth                                                   stepped
eighth                                                  faith
else            fels                                    belts
exit            direxit [RHD+]                          sexist
fiends          teinds, piends
filched         hilched [NI3+], milched [NI2]           zilch
filth           spilth, tilth
fifth                                                   drift
film            pilm [NI3+]                             kiln
fluxed          luxed [NI3+], muxed [NI3+]              ducked
glimpsed                                                rinsed
gospel                                                  hostile
gulf                                                    pulse
leashed         niched, tweesht [NI2+]
lemon                Bremen, hemen [NI3+], Yemen
liquid                                                  wicked
mollusk                                                 smallest
mouthed         southed
month           oneth [Note 1], n+1th [Note 2]          grumph
mulcts                                                  bulks
mulched         gulched [NI3+]                          bulged
ninth                                                   pint
oblige          cytopyge [NI3]                          bides
of              sov
oomph           sumph [NI3+]
orange          sporange
pint            jint [NI2+]                             bind
poem            phloem, proem
pregnant        regnant
purple          curple [NI3+], hirple [NI3+]
puss            schuss
rhythm          smitham
scalds          balds, caulds [NI3+], faulds [NI3+]
scarce          stairs, clairce [NI2], hairse [NI2+]    cares
sculpts                                                 gulps
silver          chilver [NI3+]
sixth                                                   kicks
spirit          squiret [NI2+]
tenth           nth                                     bent
tsetse          baronetcy, intermezzi, theetsee
tuft            puffed, yuft
twelfth                                                 health
wasp                knosp [NI3+]
widow           kiddo
width                                                   bridge
window          indo, lindo
wolf                                                    bulls

Note 1:
Justified by analogy with "thousandth," "hundredth," "tenth."
Note 2:
Justified by analogy with "nth".  A citation: "The Nature of
Rationality," Robert Nozick, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ,
1993, p. 21

Unless noted otherwise, all words occur in Webster's Tenth Collegiate
Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Springfield, MA, 1994.

NI3 = Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary
NI2 = Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary, Second Edition
OED = Oxford English Dictionary
RHD = Random House Unabridged Dictionary
+ means slang, foreign, obsolete, dialectical, etc.

[ Editor: from alt.folklore.urban, July 1994, in a thread on unrhymable
words; "silver" and "purple" had been named as unrhymables. ]

Ed Cannon <ecannon@utxvms.cc.utexas.edu> writes:

    "Pretty Good Rhyme for Silver"

    Some folks are such that when they see silver,
    They cannot resist a desire to pilfer.

Hey!!! Give that man a silver banana.  Precisely the word I had in mind.

And if anyone out there is so picayune that they don't like this rhyme,
then I guess they can add "pilfer" to the list of words that don't have
good rhymes.

Incidentally, I used to think that "smegma" had no really mellifluous
rhymes (not that I stayed awake at night worrying about it) until I
noticed that, in a wholly appropriate twist of the language, "Legba"
rhymes quite nicely.

And provides the premise for a truly interesting poem.

-- Mark Wojcik <volcifer@ccs.neu.edu>

[ Editor: a rhyme for "orange". ]

In Britain (actually in South Wales), there is a mountain called the
Blorenge, so you could 'roll an orange down the Blorenge' if you felt so
inclined.

-- Martyn Tovey <martyn@perihelion.co.uk>