Dankrap

Verse checker: the rhyme scheme and syllables of every line

Every count comes from how the words are pronounced — the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary — not from their spelling, so though rhymes with snow and fire can be one syllable or two. Need rhymes for a single word? Use the rhyme finder.

Checked as you type, on this device. Your text is never uploaded: the page only downloads this site's own dictionary files, named by a word's first two letters or its vowel sound.

Paste or type some lines. Each line gets its syllable count, its stress pattern and a rhyme letter for its last word.

How each line is read

Every word is looked up in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which spells 125,916 English words as sounds with the stressed vowels marked. A syllable is a vowel sound, so village (V IH1 L AH0 JH) has two and fire is listed both as one and as two. When a word has pronunciations of different lengths, the line shows a range: Dickinson's “The Carriage held but just Ourselves” is 8–9, because the dictionary gives ourselves as both our-SELVES and ow-er-SELVES.

Stress pattern
/ is a main stress, \ a secondary stress, x unstressed, one mark per syllable and a space between words. Frost's “Whose woods these are I think I know” reads / / / / / / / /: the dictionary marks every one-syllable word stressed except a few like the and a, so the iambic beat you hear is not shown on short words — read the marks on the longer ones.
Rhyme letters
The last word of each line gets a letter; lines that rhyme share it. A letter in a solid box is a perfect rhyme — identical sounds from the last stressed vowel to the end (know / though / snow, so Frost's stanza is AABA). A dashed box marked near is a slant rhyme of one of four kinds: the same vowels with consonants from the same sound family (time / line); the same vowels with the same number of consonants (nation / basin); a different vowel before identical consonants (soul / all); or a match on the last syllable where one word leaves it unstressed (me / immortality). A perfect rhyme shares its letter with any earlier line, so Frost's chain rhyme reads AABA BBCB across two stanzas; a near rhyme counts only within the same verse (a blank line starts a new one) and the four lines before, so a loose match far away does not become part of the scheme. A word said two ways (wind, read) takes the pronunciation that rhymes. One correction to the dictionary: before an r it writes the same vowel two ways — here HH IY1 R but queer K W IH1 R, poor UW but tour UH — so the checker treats each pair as one vowel.
Internal rhymes
Highlighted words inside the lines are perfect rhymes with another word in the same line or the next one — flow … know … glow — ignoring a word repeated and words whose rhyming vowel is unstressed (the, a), which would otherwise rhyme with half the text.
Words the dictionary does not have
They are underlined with a ?, get no stress and no rhyme letter, and their syllables are an estimate (the line count gets a ~ and the word “estimate”). The estimate: count groups of vowel letters (a e i o u y, y not as a first letter); do not count a final silent e (but -ee, -ye and consonant + le do count: table is 2); do not count a final -ed except after t or d (jumped 1, wanted 2) or a final -es except after s x z ch sh g c (boxes 2); never fewer than 1. A dropped g is put back first: blazin' is read as blazing with its last sound said as n, so it keeps its dictionary pronunciation.
Copy annotated
Copies plain text: the rhyme letter (* near, = the same word repeated, ? not in the dictionary), the syllable count, the line and its stress marks, then the scheme — ready to paste into notes or a message.

What this cannot do

  • General American pronunciations only. Accents differ: bath and cat share a vowel here but not in most of England, and caught / cot rhyme for many Americans but are listed two ways. Blake's “eye” / “symmetry” scores as no rhyme, because nobody says sym-me-TRY now: Tyger's first stanza comes out AABC.
  • Stress in speech is not stress in the dictionary. Short words carry their dictionary stress; how a singer lands a line — stretching a word over two notes, swallowing a syllable — is not in any dictionary.
  • Missing words are estimates. New slang, names and brand names are often absent; the spelling rule above miscounts words like lion (1 by the rule, 2 in speech) and poem. Numbers written as digits are skipped: write twenty, not 20.
  • English only, and up to 120 lines at a time.
  • No judgement of your writing. It reports sounds; whether a near rhyme works or a line should scan is your call.

Where the sounds come from

Pronunciations: the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon University, BSD-style licence — licence), pinned to one version recorded in the snapshot record. Rhymes follow the same rules as the rhyme finder; words are not suggested here, so the site's blocklist of slurs and explicit words only means those words have no pronunciation shipped and are counted with the estimate.

Private by design. The page downloads small dictionary files from this site — named by two letters (/data/w/wo.json holds every word starting wo) and by vowel sound (/data/r/uh.json) — and does all the work on your device. An 8-line stanza needs about 50 to 60 of them, mostly a few kilobytes each; they are kept for offline use after the first time.