Phonetic Matching

This is one of these cases where inheriting hacked-together piece of crap (English spelling) makes a lot of additional work higher up.

Another example is poetry. A regex can find rhymes in Polish. Same postfix == it rhymes.

In English it's a feat of engineering.

It's really just a feat of data collection (e.g. rhymezone.com). You just compile all English words and record which ones rhyme with which.

(Yeah it's labor-intensive, but probably not moreso than, say, writing a dictionary.)

> You just compile all English words and record which ones rhyme with which

I suppose, if we ignore accents and heteronyms... both of which English is famous for, unfortunately!

Shakespeare in RP loses most of the raunchy jokes as an example of the above.

My highschool English teacher was horrified when she figured out why us boys were laughing when reading her copy of the first folio, our hick accent ment we were getting some of the jokes she didn't even notice.

Theme rhyming with sixteen in the Cranberry's song Zombie is another.

English orthography isn't really hacked together. Most of the "examples" I see people bandy about are because you're reading the wrong English: try Old English, instead. For example, knight: it was pronounced "k-ng-ee-h-tuh" (my IPA is too rusty to use). That's, like, precisely how it's spelled? What's gone wrong is the our modern pronunciation is poor.

Other languages have this even worse. Try comparing Egyptian Colloquial Arabic vs literary Arabic. I mean... these are different languages. Or, for instance, American Sign Language (ASL) vs. written English: the former is more like Chinese than English.

There was an effort to revive the Shakespearean pronunciation by David Crystal. You can see YouTube videos of David and his son Ben talking about it and reciting parts of Shakespeare to highlight the jokes and word play.