Paste a stanza, get its scheme labelled letter by letter — plus the orphans, the slant rhymes and the lazy identicals.
Everyone knows AABB and ABAB and almost nobody can reliably tell you which one they just wrote, because hearing the scheme while writing the words is genuinely hard. This tool labels each line by its end sound, prints the scheme, and then points at the three things that usually go wrong: a line whose end sound has no partner, a pair that only half rhymes, and the same word repeated at the end of two lines.
Run it and the scheme shows up here.
What the scheme is actually doing
Couplets (AABB) are the most resolved and the most predictable: every line closes immediately. Alternating (ABAB) keeps one thread open across four lines, which is why it feels more like an argument than a statement. Enclosed (ABBA) turns the stanza back on itself. Monorhyme (AAAA) is a drum. None of these is better — but they do different things, and picking one deliberately is faster than discovering it afterwards.
The flags are where the real work is. An orphan is a line whose end sound appears nowhere else in the stanza; one orphan in eight lines is usually fine, three means the scheme is not holding. A slant rhyme shares a vowel but not the ending consonant — it reads as a rhyme in most contemporary styles, and as a mistake to anyone who grew up on strict schemes. An identical rhyme repeats the actual word, which almost always reads as running out of ideas rather than as a device.
How to use the result
- If the scheme is “mixed”, look at the orphans first. Mixed usually means two stanzas pasted together, or a stanza that changed its mind halfway through.
- Slant rhymes are marked with a lowercase letter. A deliberate slant is a choice; an accidental one is a near miss that will sound worse sung than read.
- Identical rhymes are worth fixing even in genres that tolerate repetition, because the listener hears the same word twice in four lines and assumes you could not think of anything.
- Paste two stanzas with a blank line between them and check whether the scheme changes. A song whose scheme shifts between verse one and verse two usually feels longer than it is.
Questions people ask
- Why is my scheme wrong?
End sounds are taken from spelling, so “love” and “move” group together and “though” and “low” do not. If the letters look wrong, trust your ear — the tool is reading, not listening.
- What is a slant rhyme exactly?
Two words sharing the same final vowel sound but not the consonants after it. “Home” and “alone” is slant. “Home” and “gone” is a full rhyme in most singing, and neither in strict verse.
- Can it handle more than one stanza?
Yes. Separate them with a blank line and each gets its own scheme, plus a note on whether the scheme changed between them.
- What if every line has a different end sound?
Then you have written blank verse, which is a real thing and a hard one to sing. The tool will report no discernible scheme rather than inventing one.
What this tool does not do. It groups end sounds by spelling, not by pronunciation, so it will mis-group words it cannot hear and miss rhymes that do not look alike. It cannot judge whether your rhymes are any good, and it has no idea what a slant rhyme is acceptable in your genre. Nothing is uploaded; everything runs in your browser and works offline. See the site disclaimer. Written by Nico, who builds these tools and writes about writing at WrittenTone.