---
id: pronouncing
version: "0.3.0"
license: MIT
license_treatment: permissive
maintenance: active
---

# pronouncing — A simple interface for the CMU pronouncing dictionary

License: permissive · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 102.4K/mo

## What it is and what it does

Pronouncing wraps the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary in a lightweight Python interface, letting you look up pronunciations and find rhyming words without the overhead of installing NLTK. It depends on cmudict for the underlying phonetic data and exposes functions like rhymes() to query words by their sound patterns. The package is designed for developers, educators, and researchers who need phonetic lookups in their code.

Typical use cases include building rhyme generators, analyzing word sounds in poetry or music applications, and educational tools that teach pronunciation. The package has been actively maintained since its 2015 release and carries no known security vulnerabilities.

Use it for:

- Generate rhyming word suggestions for poetry, songwriting, or creative writing tools
- Build pronunciation-aware word games or educational applications
- Analyze phonetic patterns in text for linguistic research or NLP experiments
- Create word-search or word-puzzle solvers that match on sound rather than spelling
- Teach pronunciation and phonetics concepts in educational software

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

Provides a simple Python interface to query the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for word pronunciations, rhymes, and phonetic matching without requiring NLTK.

Yes. Low install friction, active maintenance, permissive MIT license, no vulnerabilities, and a focused single-purpose design make this a safe choice for any project needing CMU dictionary lookups. The single dependency (cmudict) is standard and well-maintained. Install if you need rhyme or pronunciation queries without NLTK's larger footprint.

## Install

pip install pronouncing
uv add pronouncing
poetry add pronouncing

## Installing pronouncing

Before you install: Low friction: pure Python wheel with a single runtime dependency (cmudict). Actively maintained as of 2026-04-17 with 323 repository stars and no known vulnerabilities.

License in practice: MIT license (permissive) means you can use, modify, and distribute this package freely in commercial or private projects with minimal restrictions.

Quickstart:

pip install pronouncing

import pronouncing
rhymes = pronouncing.rhymes("climbing")
print(rhymes)

Requires Python 3.9 or later.

Verify before relying:

- Whether the package's rhyme-finding algorithm handles edge cases like homophones or variant pronunciations
- Performance characteristics when querying large numbers of words or complex phonetic patterns

## Package facts

- License: MIT (permissive)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 102.4K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

rhyme finder python, cmu pronouncing dictionary, word pronunciation lookup, phonetic word matching, rhyming words api, cmu dict interface, pronunciation database python, phonetics, nlp-adjacent, educational

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