Idiom
rhyme or reason
Meaning
Logic; common sense.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“His strange plan has no rhyme or reason.”
“The instructions for this new machine are so confusing that they seem to have no rhyme or reason.”
“The sudden changes to the company policy lacked any rhyme or reason, leaving the employees frustrated and unable to understand the new direction.”
Examples
simple
“His strange plan has no rhyme or reason.”
contextual
“The instructions for this new machine are so confusing that they seem to have no rhyme or reason.”
complex
“The sudden changes to the company policy lacked any rhyme or reason, leaving the employees frustrated and unable to understand the new direction.”
Origin
Calque of Middle French n'y avoir ryme ne raison (Eustache Deschamps), attributed to the poet Edmund Spenser in a conversation with Queen Elizabeth I.
Key words
Related idioms
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