Free instrument
Rhyme Scheme
Finder.Paste a poem — get its letters
Paste any poem and read its rhyme scheme as letters — ABAB, AABB, AABBA — matched by phonetic sound, not spelling, with slant rhymes counted the way a reader's ear counts them.
Deterministic. Letters come from phonetic endings in the CMU pronouncing dictionary — the same engine that annotates our poem generator.
Rhyme scheme
The letter pattern appears here — AABB, ABAB, or something stranger.
Line by line
Each line appears with its end word and its letter.
01
How the finder reads your poem
The tool takes the final word of each line and looks it up in the CMU pronouncing dictionary, a phonetic database of 134,000 English words. Two lines rhyme when their end words share the same sounds from the last stressed vowel onward — 'day' and 'away' both end in the EY sound, so they get the same letter.
This matters because spelling lies. 'Love' and 'move' look like a rhyme and aren't; 'through' and 'blue' don't look like one and are. A scheme finder that works on letters instead of sounds will hand you wrong answers exactly where English is most treacherous.
Words the dictionary doesn't know — names, coinages, archaic spellings — fall back to suffix matching, and the line-by-line readout shows you every end word so you can overrule the machine where your own ear disagrees.
02
The schemes you'll meet most often
AABB is the couplet pattern: pairs of lines rhyming as they arrive, the sound of nursery rhymes and Pope. ABAB alternates, which lets a stanza breathe a little longer before it resolves; most ballads and hymns live here. ABBA — the envelope — closes back on its opening sound, and Tennyson built In Memoriam out of it.
Fixed forms carry fixed schemes. A limerick is AABBA. A Shakespearean sonnet runs ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, three alternating quatrains sealed with a couplet. Terza rima chains forward, ABA BCB CDC, each stanza handing a rhyme to the next — the engine Dante built the Divine Comedy on.
And plenty of good poems return no tidy pattern at all. Free verse will read as ABCDEF — every letter new. That's not a failure; it's a finding.
03
Why your scheme may surprise you
Poets rhyme off-centre on purpose. Emily Dickinson pairs 'soul' with 'all', Yeats pairs 'push' with 'rush' — slant rhymes that share the vowel or the closing consonants but not both. Read strictly, these dissolve into separate letters and a rhymed poem looks unrhymed.
So the finder scores near-misses and counts a pair as rhyming when the endings are close enough that a reader's ear accepts them. When the slant reading and the strict reading disagree, you see both — which is often the most interesting thing the tool can tell you about a poem.
04Questions
What is a rhyme scheme?
The pattern of end rhymes in a poem, written as letters. Lines that rhyme with each other get the same letter: a couplet is AABB, an alternating quatrain is ABAB, a limerick is AABBA. The letters restart from A with each new sound, not each new stanza.
How do I find the rhyme scheme of my poem?
Paste it into the finder above and press the button. The tool takes the last word of every line, looks up its phonetic ending in the CMU pronouncing dictionary, and gives matching endings the same letter. You get the scheme string plus a line-by-line breakdown.
Does it detect slant rhymes?
Yes. The main readout counts slant rhymes — pairs like 'been' and 'seen' that share most but not all of their sound. When slant matches change the picture, the exact-rhymes-only scheme is shown alongside so you can see both readings.
Can it generate a rhyme scheme for me?
This page reads schemes; it doesn't write poems. If you want a poem written to a scheme — an ABAB quatrain, a Shakespearean sonnet, a limerick — the Storgy Poem Generator produces one and annotates its own rhymes with the same engine.
What about internal rhyme?
The finder reads end rhyme only, since that's what a scheme notates. Internal rhymes ('While I nodded, nearly napping') are real craft but they don't get letters. For a full reading of sound devices inside lines, run the poem through the Poem Analyzer.
Is it free?
Completely. No account, no daily cap, no AI budget — the computation is deterministic dictionary lookup, so we can afford to leave the door open.
05Correlated instruments
Poem Generator
Writes to a scheme instead of reading one — sonnets, limericks, ballads, each rhyme annotated.
Inst. 02Poem Analyzer
The full reading: theme, tone, devices, and the sound-work happening inside the lines.
Inst. 03Syllable Counter
The other half of prosody — per-word and per-line counts for checking meter and form.
Rhyme is argument by sound.
Deterministic phonetic matching — no AI spend, no daily cap.