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Rhyme is the repetition of similar sounds, especially the ending sounds of words in lines of poetry. End rhyme happens when the last words of adjacent lines share the same sounds, like “cat” and “hat.” This creates a musical quality and helps establish a pattern or rhyme scheme in the verse.

Rhythm, by contrast, refers to the overall beat or cadence—the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables that give poetry its flow—rather than the specific repetition of end sounds. Meter is a specific, regular pattern of those stresses in a line, a formal aspect of rhythm. Auditory isn’t a technical term used to describe this phenomenon. So, the term that best describes the repetition of similar sounds at the ends of lines is rhyme.