Learn English – Does any word rhyme with ‘wolf’

Here are a few ways you can find it, depending on what you want.

Your two examples are words where the "OR" sound occurs as the primary stressed vowel sound of the word. I'm not sure if that's important to you or not. For example, abHOR and abNORmal have the "OR" sound where the word has primary stress. Acorn, AIRforce, and deporTEE do not.

Here are a few approaches you can take to find words that contain the "or" sound.

Approach A: Search for the phonetic pattern in Ben Briedis' Phonetic Word Search

Navigate to http://www.benbriedis.com/phonetic/search.php and search for the phonetic pattern you want to find.

If you DO care about stress, search for:

.+ AO1 R .+

If you DO NOT care about stress, search for:

.+ AO R .+

The ".+" part of the pattern matches any 1 or more phonemes. This helps ensure that the "OR" is sandwiched between other phonemes, and doesn't only appear at the front or end of the word. If you want to match any occurrence, use ".*" instead of ".+".

This is a great tool if you want to search phonetic patterns ad-hoc.

Approach B: Search for the word in Dillfrog Muse

(Full disclosure: I'm the author of this tool)

Use the Dillfrog Muse "Contains (sound)" search to finds words that contain the phonemes of "or", ignoring stress.

This does not eliminate words that start or end with "or" though.

Approach C: Search Raw Pronunciation Data using the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary

The most flexible option, but also the most bare-metal.

If you're feeling a bit hardcore with a text editor, download the latest CMU Pronouncing Dictionary file. (Sorry, I'd link it, but I don't have enough reputation to post more than 2 links.) At the time of writing, you want to download the file named "cmudict-0.7b". Search that text using your favorite tool that has regex support (such as Notepad++ or egrep). This file lists the pronunciations of words, 1 word per line.

Using the ARPABET, "or"'s pronunciation looks like "AO1 R". So you can search for any other lines that contain "AO1 R" and you'll see words that have the "or" sound where that vowel sound has the primary stress.

If you don't care about stress, use a regex to match any number instead of the 1. For example, search for a regex of:

AO[0-9] R

Again, this does not eliminate words that start or end with "or" though.

The names come from French, where (from French Wikipédia)

A rhyme is called feminine when the last phoneme is a mute e (formerly called an "e féminin").

That is, a rhyme was called feminine if the words ended with a mute e. Back when the rules for French poetry were formulated, these e's were pronounced, but unstressed, and one name for them was feminine e's. Mute e's are still pronounced when reading poetry and when singing, although not in normal speech.

Why were they called feminine e's? It probably didn't have anything to do with mute e's being weaker or more girly-sounding in any sense; they were called feminine e's because, to turn male adjectives and some male nouns into female ones, you added a mute e. For example, in French, a big black cat is:

un gros chat noir (boy cat),
une grosse chatte noire (girl cat).

This rule in French applies only for adjectives and some nouns which have male/female versions (e.g., chanteur, chanteuse); there are quite a few masculine nouns that end in mute e's and feminine nouns that don't.

You can see that the name "feminine rhyme" originated in French by looking at the reference (from London, 1764) T Romano gives in his answer, where a feminine rhyme is defined as one ending in an e-mute. In English, words (e.g., state and gait) rhyme whether or not they end in a silent e.