rhyme

To quickly articulate a litany of things or recite the items of a list. When asked if we had any baby names in mind, Sarah started rhyming them off one after the other. I then rhymed off a list of things that needed to be changed or improved if the company wished to survive.

The particular logic, sense, method, or meaning of a given situation, action, person, thing, group, etc. (Most often used in negative formations to indicate an absence or lack thereof.) Could someone please explain to me the rhyme or reason behind the program's selection process? I've looked over it several times, but there's no rhyme or reason to the agreement we were sent this morning.

Cliché without logic, order, or planning. (Describes something disorganized. *Typically: be ~; have ~.) There seems to be neither rhyme nor reason to Gerald's filing system. The novel's plot had neither rhyme nor reason.

[for someone] to make one word rhyme with another word. I need to rhyme tree with some other word. Any suggestions? Can I rhyme good with food?

[for a word] to rhyme with another word. You can't use house in that line of the poem, because it doesn't rhyme with mice. The last word in your poem doesn't rhyme with any other word in the poem!

Sl. to say what you have to say; to give one's speech or make one's plea. Go run your rhymes with somebody else! I told him to run his rhymes elsewhere.

Cliché without purpose, order, or reason. (See variations in the examples. Fixed order.) The teacher said my report was disorganized. My paragraphs seemed to be without rhyme or reason. Everything you do seems to be without rhyme or reason.

without any reasonable explanation or purpose Because the cave was formed by gases that ate away the rock, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to its shape.

if there is no rhyme or reason why something happens, there is no obvious explanation for it I don't know what makes her behave like that. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

An absence of common sense or reasonableness, as in This memo has no rhyme or reason. Closely related variants are without rhyme or reason, as in The conclusion of her paper was without rhyme or reason, and neither rhyme nor reason, as in Neither rhyme nor reason will explain that lawyer's objections. This term originated in French about 1475 and began to be used in English about a century later. Sir Thomas More is credited with saying of a mediocre book that a friend had put into verse, "Now it is somewhat, for now it is rhyme; whereas before it was neither rhyme nor reason."

Making no sense at all. “Rhyme” alludes to poetry and by extension all of the creative arts, while “reason” stands for intellect. Accordingly, something that can't be understood or justified in terms of either artistic merit or logic is indeed of little value.