Free tool

Rhyme scheme analyzer

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Paste a poem or a rap verse. This labels which lines rhyme with which - ABAB, AABB, ABCB - marks each rhyme as perfect or slant, counts the syllables in every line, and tells you how many syllables deep each rhyme runs, including rhymes that stretch across more than one word.

How to read the output

Each line gets a letter. Lines sharing a letter rhyme with each other, so AABB is couplets, ABAB alternates, and AAAA is a mono-rhyme. A dash means the line rhymes with nothing else in what you pasted.

The number after each rhyme is its depth - how many syllables the rhyme covers. Depth 1 is cat / hat. Depth 2 is nation / station. Anything from 2 up is a multisyllabic rhyme, and depth is the single clearest measure of how technical a verse is.

Perfect means the sounds are identical from the stressed syllable onward. Slant means they are close but not identical - the vowels line up and the consonants do not quite. Rap runs mostly on slant rhymes, because the perfect-rhyme vocabulary for any word is tiny and runs out within a few bars.

Using it on a poem

Nothing changes except the vocabulary. Couplets come back AABB and an alternating quatrain ABAB, each line carrying its syllable count and each rhyme marked perfect or slant. Load the poem example above to see it on four lines of plain English. For classroom notation (a ballad stanza written ABCB, stanzas split as ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) and named forms like sonnets and limericks, use the rhyme scheme checker for poems.

The slant label is the part worth pointing students at. Dickinson built her ear on rhymes that almost land, and reading those as failed rhymes is how a reader misses the effect entirely. Seeing a pair labelled slant rather than dropped makes the choice visible instead of invisible.

It does not scan meter. There is no iambic pentameter detection here and no stress pattern per line. It counts syllables, which is enough to see that a line ran long or short, but scansion is a different problem and this tool does not pretend to solve it.

Why it reads lines, not words

A rhyming dictionary answers "what rhymes with orange". The famous answer is nothing - and it is wrong. Door hinge rhymes with orange perfectly well; it just does it across two words.

That is how rap actually works. Rappers do not rhyme words, they rhyme line endings, and line endings run across word boundaries: riding shotgun against flying off one, lyrical miracle against spiritual individual. A dictionary cannot see any of that, because it never looks at more than one word at a time.

So this tool strings together the sounds of the last several words of each line and compares the tails. That is why it can tell you a rhyme runs six syllables deep when neither of the final words rhymes with the other at all.

What it gets wrong

Worth knowing before you trust a number:

• Unknown words are flagged, not guessed. The dictionary holds about 40,000 English words. Recent slang, names and invented words will not be in it, and lines containing them are marked so you know the syllable count is short.
• It reads spelling, not your accent. Pronunciations come from a standard American dictionary. If you rhyme on a regional vowel, the tool may not agree with your ear. Your ear is right.
• Stress inside a phrase is approximated. Each word is looked up on its own, so a phrase like door hinge arrives with stress on both words, which nobody says. The slant test is built to tolerate that; the perfect test is stricter and will occasionally say no where you hear yes.
• Internal rhymes are not labelled yet. Only line endings are compared.
• Older spellings and archaic words may be missing. The dictionary is modern English, so a poem with thee, hath or a coined word will flag those lines rather than guess at them. Eye rhymes - love and prove - are reported as not rhyming, because by sound they do not.
• Contractions are not in the dictionary. Don't, they'd and I'm get flagged, and because a flagged word contributes nothing the syllable count for that line comes back short. Expand them if the count matters to you.
• Distant vowels can still slip past it. A pair that closes on the same consonant but travels a long way in the vowel - soul against all - may come back unrhymed. Couplets, alternating quatrains and ballad stanzas are handled; this is the edge that is left.

Where the dictionary comes from

The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, a free pronunciation database from Carnegie Mellon University, cut down to the 40,000 most common English words and encoded one character per sound so it stays small. It loads once, the first time you press Analyse, and is cached after that. Nothing you type is sent anywhere - the analysis runs in the page.

Next steps

If you want the theory rather than the measurement, read rap rhyme schemes explained. If you want to practice landing these on a beat, we keep 102 beats tagged by BPM and a Freestyle trainerBPM finder for your own tracks.

This grades a verse. It does not teach you to write one.

Analysing bars you already have is useful once. What changes your writing is doing it repeatedly, on a beat, under time pressure - which is a different exercise and needs a different tool.

That is what Rhymeable is. You pick a scheme, the beat runs, and rhyming words land on a grid a beat before you need them, so the pattern becomes something you feel rather than something you check afterwards.