Changelog (What's New?)

Week Ending 2023-07-01: Removed support for: Alexa "Rhyme Venture" skill.
Misc enhancements and bugfixes to improve user experience.
Week Ending 2023-06-24: Extended help pages.
Misc enhancements and bugfixes to improve user experience.
Week Ending 2023-06-17: Began displaying some rhyme search results in mixed case.
Removed support for: Slack slash commands, Alexa "Frog Spinner" and "Frog Rhyme" skills. Misc enhancements and bugfixes to improve user experience.
Week Ending 2023-06-10: Removed PictoPlot support (including Storm's Visualizer searchlet) due to low use and low benefit compared to your other options. Same for SentiWordNet tags.
Minor UX improvements.
Added list of hard-to-rhyme words.
Week Ending 2020-11-28: Launched the Context Search interface outside of Storm.
Week Ending 2020-11-21: General: UX improvements (tag-explorer output format, Rhyme Search field layout, compression/speed tweaks, icon, add-to-home-screen support).
Rhyme Search: Changed "I'm Feeling Rhymey" algorithm to yield more results in general. For example you should see results for "covid" that include some common words now.
Rhyme Search: Increased likelihood that the random-word search centers on a word you're familiar with, and has some familiar results.
Meaning Search: Started displaying example phrases (example usage), and fixed logic that was keeping adjective-satellite data separate from adjective data.
Week Ending 2020-11-14: General: Added more pronunciations to fill in gaps; many of the entries are programmatically generated though, which could lead to some error until further manual refinement.
General: Fixed various formatting/layout issues.
Rhyme Search: Added "Rhymes (stressed syllable)" match type. Give it a shot - especially for words whose stressed syllable is toward the beginning of the word (i.e. where you normally wouldn't see a lot of rhymes).
Meaning: Added "found on word lists" section so you can find related words.
Mosaic Assonance: Changed data source; results will have changed (in quantity and quality) quite a bit as a result.
Storm: Added initial Word Inspector UI, which includes new 'before and after' results.
Storm: Phoneme table is presented as a modal dialog now, rather than inline.
Rhyme Venture: Fixed issue where the game resets after the first guess.
Tag Explorer: On the "Explore Category" page, added line charts to visualize frequency of tags.
Week Ending 2019-08-10: Added "Muh" word list. Storm: Added V1 of phrase search, based on Wiktionary entries. Added rhyme-exclusion filter to Dial-A-Rhyme. Improved Storm load time by ~1 second (more noticeable for return visitors). Added progress bar during dictionary download. Flipped preference/cache storage to use IndexedDB instead of local storage. Improved error handling.
Week Ending 2019-07-27: Storm: added V1 of the Orange Juicer searchlet (a hybrid search to find similar words that don't rhyme). Added phonetic-similarity-based result grouper. Added tooltips to summarize each searchlet via header and selection dropdown list.
Week Ending 2019-07-13: Added oronym word list. Added proof-of-concept oronym search ("FrankenStitch") to Storm.
Week Ending 2019-07-06: Cleaned up and extended help files a bit.
Week Ending 2019-06-29: Storm: added support for Grouper (like the old non-Storm Grouper, but run client-side). Various other internal changes to support future enhancements.
Week Ending 2019-06-22: Storm: added support for grouping by Part Of Speech or Familiarity - this may come in handy when searching for related words, for example. Added support for parsing lower-case ARPABET strings like "s m ay1 l" as input.
Week Ending 2019-01-19: Sound search results include some related-word suggestions. Suggestions generally have a healthy amount of rhymes. Some offensive words are hidden from the results, but offensiveness is fairly subjective, so you may disagree.
Week Ending 2018-11-18: Started exposing links to our experimental word list "smashes", from the lists page.
Week Ending 2018-05-19: Upgraded to Bootstrap 4. As a result, you're going to notice some style and formatting changes. If something's broken, let me know.
Week Ending 2018-04-25: Made the Dillfrog Storm tool available for public use, goofy and experimental as it is. This will interest folks who are looking for more control of their rhymes, or want to search for words that rhyme with a phrase, or want to search for multiple words at a time (useful for inner rhyme). It also features a different take on the "I'm Feeling Rhymey" algorithm that includes more results than before.
Week Ending 2017-11-18: Began hiding some Sound search results that share a common stem with the previously-displayed result within a grouping. In other words, you're more likely to see results like "snort, soar" where you previously saw "snort, snorts, soar, soared, soars". It's not perfect - some words of the same stem will still appear - but this should reduce noise in the results of more permissive Match Types. Thanks to B for pointing this out.
Week Ending 2017-10-15: Minor fixes for usability and stability.
Week Ending 2017-09-16: Improved bandwidth usage. (Some page loads will cost you less data or load faster.)
Week Ending 2017-07-29: Fixed some pronunciations to yield more useful results. Started hiding some uncommon words that were seeping through the cracks.
Week Ending 2017-07-08: Significantly overhauled "I'm Feeling Rhymey" search logic, and the underlying slanting algorithm; you should find that the rhymes feel tighter than before, and in some cases the results have more variety as well. Removed the "Rhymes (any)" and "Rhymes (slant)" search options, since I think their existence added confusion, and users probably mean to use "I'm Feeling Rhymey" instead. If you really miss these options, please let me know why you liked to use them instead of "I'm Feeling Rhymey", and I'll try to help you out. Added rudimentary Alexa support; the Frog Rhyme skill will get you some perfect rhymes in a pinch. Added HTTPS support. Fixed some word-familiary and pronunciation database issues.
Week Ending 2017-06-03: Fixed defect in the "Vowel/Consonant Pattern" search which incorrectly categorized a vowel as a consonant. Added "Vowel Sounds (stressed + consonant family + vowels)" search, which gives some good slant rhymes. Cleaned up a few bad and missing pronunciations, based on user feedback, so results should look a tiny bit more accurate.
Week Ending 2016-05-28: Added support to flip to a random word in the Sound Search, for certain match types. Use this to challenge yourself with new rhyming pairs when you're stuck. If you want more results, be sure to uncheck "Only Common Words".
Week Ending 2016-01-30: Added support for random words by part of speech, where we group the subcategories of part of speech types (example: list random words among all nouns, not just nouns of a given subcategory).
Week Ending 2016-01-18: Improved metadata for social media linking. Added experimental Slack command integration (private). Started gently plugging FAWM For a little while, because it's too cool for you to miss.
Week Ending 2015-11-21: Added survey link. Minor UI performance and formatting tweaks. Added Vowel Sounds (last 2) search. Added "Same" word type filter, which only shows words that have at least 1 part of speech in common with the input word. Began restructuring the 'About' section, and added to the 'Help' content.
Week Ending 2015-11-14: Added Rhymes (vowel shift) match type to the rhyming dictionary. Various fixes related to syllable counts, and translating Moby pronunciations. Removed some lists that were mostly redundant with the newer "part-of-speech" lists.
Week Ending 2015-11-07: Changed data structures so that typical sound searches run faster. Turned off word-cloud output since it slows down render time and I'm not sure that it's really been useful to searchers. If you want this back, mail me! Our Web host also significantly upgraded their database hardware (added SSDs, faster CPU), so you should find that searches run faster than before.
Week Ending 2015-10-31: Added part-of-speech word lists. Minor pronunciation cleanup. Removed some Sound match types that were underused.
Week Ending 2015-10-22: Treatment of R-colored vowels is more consistent across vowel sounds, which should lead to more good rhyme matches for consonance, assonance and general rhyming. Improved slant rhyme search logic to include wider groups of results. Disabled "Word Type" filtering for some less-popular queries until I can improve performance on the backend.
Week Ending 2015-09-22: Minor tweaks for Chrome on Lollipop (theme color, icon for 'add to homescreen').
Week Ending 2015-09-05: Added "Vowel Sounds (stress + consonant)" search. Added "Spelling (bookends)" search. Minor fixes to pronunciation data. Started importing Moby pronunciation data to fill in some gaps, though I'm not feeling great about accuracy yet. Reimplemented the list of ambiguous words, and added a new random list of specific words.
Week Ending 2015-08-29: Added double metaphone sounds-like search. Looks like the C# implementation doesn't do perfect calculations yet, but this is good enough for our purposes since we don't need the exact value verbatim. Increased analytics so we can improve your search results in the long run. Reduced overall page load time. Added homophone/alternate-spelling search. Added bookend searches. Increased pickiness of which words we highlight (so we have 2 tiers of familiarity/commonness now). Added a few custom pronunciations. "Common Words Only" is enabled by default again.
Week Ending 2015-08-22: Added word grouper prototype (in prep for a list-display UI). Started using Google Books 1-Gram frequency data to determine 'commonness' of a word instead of using WordNet tag count. This means words like "you", "of", "the", "I" and "me" are now considered common. Aww yeah. Take that, WordNet Tag Count!
Week Ending 2015-08-15: Added hyponym-based word lists. Minor navigation changes (URLs, link formatting).
Week Ending 2015-08-08: Reimplemented the "meaning" search. Added "Rhyme (family)" search. Made "I'm Feeling Rhymey" the default search, as it should provide a good mix of stable and slightly unstable rhymes. Fixed meaning lemmatizer so you get more expected results (e.g. "routes" -> "route", not "rout").