AbstractIt has been found that the dynamical behavior of many complex physical systems can be properly described by nonlinear DDEs. However, in the related literature, research focusing on such equations with rational nonlinearity is rare. Hence, the present study makes an attempt to fill the existing gap. To this end, we consider two distinct DDEs with rational nonlinearity. We observed that the model equations assume three kinds of traveling wave solutions; hyperbolic, trigonometric and rational including kink-type solitary waves and singular periodic solutions. Our discussion is based on the auxiliary equation method.