Roddy Lumsden Reviews The Chambers Rhyming Dictionary

A good workman, they say, never blames his tools. But we need good tools. A chippy needs his awl, his chisel, his rasp, and his saw must be sharp. What do we poets need? Well, an eyeliner and the back of a bus ticket will do, but the artisan poet will have a few other tools to hand. A notebook, for instance. A Moleskine is preferable, and it was one of those I reached for when I headed off to a top fashion shoot to write poems about Kate Moss a few months ago. One with a page marker ribbon, black elastic strap and creamy squared paper. But mostly I prefer to use a battered John Menzies A6 cash book which I've used for years for jottings.

What else? A pile of stamps to bring home those rejection letters is required. A clutch of fineliners. A marker pen (and a red pen for editing friends' manuscripts!). Then there are the manuals. Many poets will have their handbook of forms, to check that they are getting their syllabics right in their latest englyn, or the pattern of a pantoum. A good thesaurus – I've had my Roget for so long that the pages are slightly crumbly and it tends to make me sneeze (clears the head for the job in hand).

And a rhyming dictionary. Now, no rhyming dictionary is perfect. There's no perfect way of setting out the material. And everyone's accents are different. Does Harry Potter really rhyme with ricotta, as the new Chambers Rhyming Dictionary suggests? Depends where you come from. The word girl to me rhymes with squirrel. To my Scouse poet mate girl rhymes with tell.

Then there's the problem of how much to put in. Let's just do a quick test with this one. Let's take a simple word like castle. An old (American) rhyming dictionary I use has a few words here, the rhyme denoted as AS'l (tassel, wrastle, vassal etc) and says 'see also AS'il' offering the half-rhymes of facile and gracile. Chambers is more cautious, offering only parcel, assuming as the whole book does that we don't pronounce our Rs. This is odd for a Scottish company (and differing from the dictionary policy – look up horse in Chambers and the OED and note the difference), but we rhotics are in the minority.

The reason you only get parcel is because this new rhyming dictionary recognises and categorises by 19 different vowel sounds (most others use 14 or so). This makes things both easier and more difficult, depending, and it helps when using this book to keep in mind to look up further words which are close in rhyming terms, so here we find tassel and hassle in another section. A full index at the back helps greatly with this. Meanwhile, an online rhyming dictionary displays the strengths and weaknesses of a larger and looser database – obscurities like brassell, grassl, vantassel and kasel (don't ask me), some of which may not rhyme fully, if at all.

An extension of the usual format here allow for proper nouns, so you can now, with Chambers help, rhyme dung with Kirsty Young and Chick Corea with Mamma Mia! How famous you have to be to be included is not explained, but I noted Shilpa Shetty and Jimmy Carr just crying out to get into a poem, bringing the book bang up to date (too much so, perhaps?). Another feature is the listing of phrases as well as single words. Look up the word barrier and you will find, among other rhymes, carry her, harry her, marry her, miscarry her, parry her and remarry her – look, there's a poem on a stormy relationship already half-written for you!

Does anyone other than a poet need a rhyming dictionary, I was wondering. I suppose puzzle compiling, advertising, headline writing are a few professions in which one might be handy. Comedians too might like one – I once sat behind a man at a poetry reading who instinctively sniggered at every rhyme in a long poem, even though it was about an ancient and gory battle.

The world of rhyme is expanding these days (49 distinct types have been designated), with the subject of fuzzy rhyme (think versify and forsythia, for example) a popular subject of theses at Oxbridge. Irish poet Paul Muldoon has been called 'the man who can rhyme cat with dog' and indeed, during a robust internet discussion recently, I attempted to make a case for exactly that pair as a rhyme, a mixture of sense rhyme and consonantal chiming. I'll spare you the details, but if ever Chambers make a Fuzzy Rhyming Dictionary, poets are going to have to add another tool to their shed – a wheelbarrow to carry it around in.