Rhyme Scheme & Meter Analyzer

A rhyme scheme describes which line endings in a poem sound alike. Labelling it by hand means saying each pair aloud and keeping track of letters; with a long poem or a song it is easy to lose count. This tool does it from pronunciations, so it hears “day” and “May” as a rhyme and “love” and “move” as merely looking alike, and it also shows each line’s stress pattern and likely meter.

How the scheme is labelled

The last word of the first line gets the letter A. Each following line either rhymes with an earlier ending and gets its letter, or starts a new sound with the next letter. The result is the familiar pattern: AABB for couplets, ABAB for alternating rhyme, ABBA for enclosed rhyme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG for a Shakespearean sonnet. Blank lines are kept, so stanzas stay visible in the scheme.

Sound, not spelling

Two words rhyme perfectly when they sound the same from their last stressed vowel to the end: “nation” and “station”, “day” and “May”. Pronunciations come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, so eye rhymes such as “love” and “move”, which look alike but sound different, are not counted as perfect rhymes, while “weight” and “late”, which look different, are. Words missing from the dictionary are compared by their spelling.

Slant rhymes

Poets and songwriters often use near rhymes, where only the stressed vowel matches (“lake” and “fate”) or only the final consonants match (“love” and “move”). With slant rhymes switched on, such pairs share a letter and are marked as slant in the line list; switch it off to see perfect rhymes only.

Stress and meter

Under each line you see its stress pattern, with x for an unstressed syllable and / for a stressed one. Stresses come from the dictionary; short words such as “the”, “of” and “to” count as unstressed, as in normal speech. The tool then compares the pattern with the four classic feet — iambic (x/), trochaic (/x), anapestic (xx/) and dactylic (/xx) — and names the best fit with the number of feet, such as iambic pentameter for five iambs, plus a percentage showing how well it fits.

Where your ear decides

Automatic scansion is an aid, not a verdict. Poets vary meter on purpose, a word can take more stress in one line than another, and pronunciations differ between accents. Use the patterns to check where a line breaks the expected rhythm, then read it aloud.

A worked example

The opening quatrain of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate…”) comes out as ABAB: day and May rhyme perfectly, while temperate and date are matched as a slant rhyme because they share only their final t sound. The first line has ten syllables and is labelled iambic pentameter. Switch slant rhymes off and the scheme becomes ABAC, because in modern pronunciation temperate and date do not rhyme fully.

Related tools

Count syllables line by line with the Syllable Counter, highlight alliteration and assonance with the Alliteration Finder, or write a name poem with the Acrostic Helper.