Holorime (or holorhyme ) is a form of rhyme where two very similar sequences of sounds can form phrases composed of different words and with different meanings. For example, the two lines of Miles Kington's poem "A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity" are pronounced the same in some British English dialects: Holorime pairs may also be referred to as oronyms.

In French

In French poetry, rime richissime ("very rich rhyme") is a rhyme of more than three phonemes. A holorime is an extreme example. For example (Marc Monnier): Also called rime multimillionnaire (see https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/rime_millionnaire ) 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 (ぎなた読み) in Japanese. The word itself is a ginatayomi, since it arises from a misreading: These words are consequently also known as Benkei-yomi. While ginata is a nonsense word, in many famous examples the meaning of the phrase changes based on the word boundaries:

Other examples

A mondegreen (or in Japanese soramimi) is a holorime generated by misheard song lyrics, such as mishearing " 'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" as " 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy." A homophonic translation is a holorime or near-holorime where the two homophonic or near-homophonic readings come from different languages, such as "Humpty Dumpty" in English and "Un petit d'un petit" in French. Homophonic translations are a specific form of macaronic wordplay. French author Raymond Roussel described his writing process as a method of connecting two sentences that were holorimes of each other, "I chose two similar words. For example, billard (billiard) and pillard (looter). Then I added to it words similar but taken in two different directions, and I obtained two almost identical sentences thus. The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale which can start with the first and finish by the second."