About the Poem Meter & Rhyme Scanner
Paste a poem and every line comes back scanned: each syllable marked stressed or unstressed, the syllables grouped into feet, the metre named — iambic pentameter, trochaic octameter, anapestic trimeter — and every foot that breaks the pattern highlighted and named, from the inverted first foot to the feminine ending. Beside it, the rhyme scheme is lettered stanza by stanza, with slant rhymes and rhymes on an unstressed syllable marked for what they are.
The stresses come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, Carnegie Mellon’s 126,000-word record of how American English is actually pronounced. The dictionary knows that compare is stressed on its second syllable; it cannot know whether thee takes the beat in a given line. That judgement is made by fitting each line to every candidate metre and keeping the one that explains it with the fewest licences, then letting the poem’s own norm settle close calls.
Scansion is partly interpretation, and two trained readers will disagree on a syllable or two in most lines. So the model was measured against published expert scansions before it shipped, and the numbers are on this page rather than a claim of perfection. Words the dictionary lacks are flagged, not silently guessed.
Pick a line ending to see perfect rhymes and near rhymes for it, grouped by syllable count so a replacement keeps the line’s length. Suggestions come from Datamuse.
Hold the poem to a fixed form and see every rule it keeps or breaks, with the lines at fault.
Overrule the dictionary. Type a word’s stress as 1s and 0s, one digit per
syllable (10 for TY-ger, 010 for be-LOV-ed), then rescan.
Your overrides are kept in this browser and apply to every poem you scan here.
The whole poem as marked-up text — stress marks above each line, foot bars, metre and rhyme letter beside it — for a class handout or your own notes.
How to Use the Poem Meter & Rhyme Scanner
Paste a poem into the box, one line of verse per line, with a blank line between stanzas, and press Scan (it also rescans as you edit). Read the metre named at the top first, then go line by line: the marks above each word are its syllables, / for stressed and ˘ for unstressed, and the row beneath groups them into feet. A highlighted foot is one that departs from the poem’s pattern, and hovering it gives its name. The letters down the right are the rhyme scheme.
The Four Feet That Carry English Verse
A metrical foot is a small repeating unit of stress. English poetry leans on four of them, and a line is named for its foot and how many it has.
| Foot | Pattern | Sounds like | Metre it builds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Iamb | ˘ / | be-LIEVE, the SEA | Iambic: sonnets, blank verse, most of Frost |
| Trochee | / ˘ | TI-ger, GAR-den | Trochaic: The Raven, “Tyger Tyger” |
| Anapest | ˘ ˘ / | in-ter-VENE, on the ROAD | Anapestic: limericks, “’Twas the night before Christmas” |
| Dactyl | / ˘ ˘ | MER-ri-ly, HAP-pi-ness | Dactylic: Hardy’s “The Voice”, Longfellow’s Evangeline |
Count the feet and add the Greek prefix: monometer (one), dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, octameter (eight). Ballads alternate tetrameter and trimeter, which the scanner reports as common or ballad metre.
Why Real Poems Never Scan Perfectly
A line of perfectly regular iambs quickly sounds like a metronome, so poets vary the pattern on purpose and readers hear the variation against the beat they expect. The scanner names these rather than treating them as errors:
- Initial inversion — a trochee in place of the first iamb, the single most common licence in English verse (“Love’s not Time’s fool”).
- Spondee and pyrrhic — two stresses, or two slacks, where the pattern expects one of each. They usually come as a pair: “of true minds” is a pyrrhic followed by a spondee.
- Feminine ending — one extra unstressed syllable after the last beat, as in “never shaken” closing a pentameter line.
- Catalexis — a trochaic or dactylic line missing its final slack, which is why The Raven’s even lines end on a stress (“forgotten lore”).
- Anapestic substitution — an extra slack squeezed into an iambic line, the loosening that makes Frost sound like speech.
How the Scanner Decides, and How Often It Agrees With Experts
Every word is looked up in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which records lexical stress for words of two or more syllables: alteration is stressed on its third syllable, full stop. One-syllable words are the hard part, because their stress depends on the line. The scanner treats articles, prepositions, pronouns and auxiliary verbs as normally unstressed and other monosyllables as normally stressed, then lets the metre decide the close calls: an unstressed word sitting on a beat between two other slacks is promoted, exactly as a reader would promote it.
To choose the metre, each line is fitted against every combination of foot and length, and each licence — a substitution, a missing first syllable, an extra final one — has a cost. The poem’s metre is the one with the lowest total, and a line whose foot count is a close call is settled by what the rest of the poem does at that position.
Before publishing it we scored it against the For Better For Verse archive at the University of Virginia, which holds expert scansions of about eighty poems from Wyatt to Yeats. The model was tuned on half of the poems and scored on the other half, which it had never seen. On that held-out half it identified the metre family of 37 of 39 poems, the metre and foot count of 91.7% of lines, and the stress of 94.3% of syllables where the syllable counts agreed; syllable counts themselves agreed on 91% of lines, usually differing where a poet expects an elision such as heav’n. Rhyme grouping agreed with the archive on 96% of line pairs. Whole lines matched the expert exactly 70% of the time — the rest are mostly one-syllable judgement calls where scholars also differ.
Perfect, Slant and Wrenched Rhymes
A perfect rhyme matches everything from the last stressed vowel onward: day and
May, requited and knighted. A slant rhyme (marked
~) keeps the closing consonants but changes the vowel — love and
remove, worm and storm. A wrenched rhyme (marked
^) pairs a stressed syllable with a word’s unstressed ending, like sea with
mortality, and asks the reader to lean on a syllable they normally would not. Several of
Shakespeare’s slant pairs were full rhymes in his accent; the dictionary is modern American, so the
scanner hears them as today’s readers do.
Fixed Forms the Checker Knows
- Sonnet — fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhymed Shakespearean (abab cdcd efef gg), Petrarchan (abbaabba plus a sestet) or Spenserian.
- Villanelle — nineteen lines, five tercets and a quatrain, only two rhyme sounds, with line 1 returning at lines 6, 12 and 18 and line 3 at 9, 15 and 19.
- Haiku — three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables, counted with the dictionary’s standard pronunciation.
- Limerick — five lines rhymed aabba, three beats in the long lines and two in the short ones, in a bouncing anapestic rhythm.
Counting words or trimming a draft? The Word & Character Counter handles length, the Reading Level Analyzer uses syllable counts for readability grades, and the Speech Timer & Teleprompter is useful for a poem you mean to read aloud. Browse every Writing & Content tool for more.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is iambic pentameter, in plain terms?
A line of five feet where each foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" is a clean example — ten syllables, stresses on the even ones. Iambic is the rising rhythm English falls into naturally, which is why it carries most of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Frost.
Why does the scanner flag irregular feet in famous poems?
Because great poems are rarely perfectly regular, and the variations are where the interest is. The most common is an inverted first foot (DUM-da instead of da-DUM, as in "Love's not Time's fool"), then spondees (two stresses), pyrrhics (two slacks) and a feminine ending (an extra unstressed syllable after the last stress, "never shaken"). A flagged foot is a description, not a mistake.
How accurate is automatic scansion?
We measured it. Against the published scansions in the University of Virginia's For Better For Verse archive, on poems the model was not tuned on, it named the right metre family for 37 of 39 poems, gave the right metre and foot count for 91.7% of lines, and agreed with the expert on 94.3% of individual syllable stresses. Whole lines matched the expert scansion exactly 70% of the time; the rest usually differ by one debatable syllable, which is the kind of disagreement two human scanners also have.
What is a slant rhyme?
A rhyme where the final consonants match but the vowel does not — love and move, worm and storm, date and temperate. Dickinson built a style on them; Shakespeare's love / remove was a closer rhyme in his own pronunciation. The scanner marks these with a tilde so you can tell them from perfect rhymes, and separately marks rhymes that land on an unstressed final syllable, such as sea with mortality.
How many syllables does a haiku need in English?
The English convention is 5-7-5 across three lines, and the form checker holds you to exactly that, counting syllables with the dictionary's standard pronunciation rather than squeezing words to fit. Japanese haiku count on (sound units), which are shorter than English syllables, so many translators and contemporary haiku poets write shorter lines on purpose — 5-7-5 is a classroom rule, not a law.
