Paste a line or a stanza and see how it scans: a stress mark over every syllable, a meter verdict per line, and the rhyme scheme of the whole passage. Stress patterns come from a pronunciation dictionary of 125,000+ words, the same data behind our Rhyme Finder.
Paste a line of verse to see its stress pattern and meter. Add more lines to detect the rhyme scheme too.
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Scansion is the practice of marking which syllables in a line of verse are stressed (´) and which are unstressed (˘), then reading the pattern that emerges. Repeating units of that pattern are called feet: an iamb is da-DUM, a trochee is DUM-da, an anapest is da-da-DUM. Name the foot, count the feet, and you have named the meter. Five iambs make iambic pentameter, the workhorse line of English poetry.
A metrical foot is the basic unit of meter, a small group of stressed and unstressed syllables. Four feet cover most English verse, plus the spondee as a common substitution:
A quick caution: a word like "for-giv-en" is unstressed-stressed-unstressed, which is an amphibrach, not a dactyl. When you scan, listen to the stress rather than trusting a word's length.
The second half of a meter's name counts how many feet sit in the line: monometer (one),dimeter (two), trimeter (three), tetrameter (four),pentameter (five), hexameter (six). So "iambic pentameter" is five iambs, about ten syllables; "trochaic tetrameter" is four trochees, about eight.
Poets break these patterns on purpose. A substituted trochee or spondee inside an iambic line throws weight onto a word, and a shift in rhythm can mark a turn in thought. Meter is the pattern; rhythm is what the real words do against it. Paste your own lines above to see where they hold the pattern and where they depart.
| Meter | Beat | Canonical line |
|---|---|---|
| Iambic pentameter | da-DUM x5 | "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18) |
| Iambic tetrameter | da-DUM x4 | "Come live with me and be my love" (Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd) |
| Iambic trimeter | da-DUM x3 | "We romped until the pans" (Roethke, My Papa's Waltz) |
| Trochaic tetrameter | DUM-da x4 | "Tyger Tyger, burning bright" (Blake, The Tyger) |
| Anapestic tetrameter | da-da-DUM x4 | "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea" (Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib) |
Verdicts are deterministic pattern matches with the two allowances every metrist grants: a line may open with an inverted (trochaic) first foot, and a rising line may carry one extra unstressed syllable at the end, the so-called feminine ending. Whenever an allowance is used, the tool says so under the line. A line that fits no template within those tolerances is called irregular, and if it misses a meter by a single stress the verdict names the near miss.
Pronunciation dictionaries mark almost every one-syllable word as stressed, which would make "the cat sat on the mat" read as six straight beats. Real scansion treats little grammar words as unstressed, so this tool applies the standard function-word demotion list: articles (a, an, the), prepositions (of, to, in, on, at, by, with, from), conjunctions (and, but, or, so, as, if), pronouns (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, my, your, thee, thou) and auxiliaries (is, are, was, were, be, do, has, will, would, can, could, shall, should, may, might, must). Content monosyllables like "day", "love" and "bright" stay stressed. Both kinds remain flexible during matching, because verse routinely promotes an "and" onto a beat or demotes a noun off one; when that happens, the tool reports which words were promoted or demoted to fit.
With two or more lines, the tool also classifies the end word of each line by its rhyme sound, using the same dictionary rhyme keys as the Rhyme Finder. Lines whose end words share a sound share a letter, so a Shakespearean quatrain reads ABAB and rhyming couplets read AABB. Because matching is by pronunciation, eye rhymes like "love" and "move" are correctly kept apart, and slant rhymes (same final syllable, different stressed vowel sound) are flagged in lowercase.
Meter is the rhythmic structure of a line of verse: the pattern made by which syllables are stressed and which are not. Poets group those syllables into repeating units called feet, and the foot that repeats gives the meter its name. Meter is the fixed blueprint, while rhythm is how a particular poem actually sounds once the real words, pauses and substitutions play against that blueprint. A regular meter you can predict, and a rhythm that pushes against it, are what give a line its music.
Almost every English meter is built from four feet. Name the foot, count how many repeat per line, and you have named the meter.
| Foot | Beat | Example word |
|---|---|---|
| Iamb | da-DUM | re-veal |
| Trochee | DUM-da | love-ly |
| Anapest | da-da-DUM | un-der-stand |
| Dactyl | DUM-da-da | mur-mur-ing |
The second half of a meter's name counts the feet per line: dimeter is two, trimeter three, tetrameter four, pentameter five, hexameter six. So iambic pentameter is five iambs, ten syllables of da-DUM, the workhorse line of English poetry, and trochaic tetrameter is four trochees, a stronger falling beat.
The fastest way to hear a meter is to read a line built on it aloud. These are the standard examples, one per pattern.
| Meter | Line | Poem |
|---|---|---|
| Iambic pentameter | "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" | Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 |
| Iambic tetrameter | "I wandered lonely as a cloud" | Wordsworth |
| Trochaic tetrameter | "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary" | Poe, The Raven |
| Anapestic tetrameter | "The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold" | Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib |
| Dactylic hexameter | "This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks" | Longfellow, Evangeline |
Poets break the pattern on purpose. A spondee (two equally stressed syllables, as in "yellow wood" in Frost's "The Road Not Taken") or an inverted opening foot pulls the ear to a particular word. Free verse drops fixed meter entirely, as in Langston Hughes's "Mother to Son", and organises rhythm by phrasing and line break instead. Meter is a tool, not a rule, and the checker above shows you where your line sits against the pattern so you can decide when to hold it and when to break it.
Meter is the organised pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that gives a poem its rhythm. It is measured in feet, such as iambs or trochees, and it is what separates metrical verse from prose.
Five iambic feet per line, ten syllables alternating unstressed and stressed. It is the most common meter in English poetry, used heavily by Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer.
Meter is the fixed, recurring pattern the poet sets up. Rhythm is how the poem actually moves, including every variation from that pattern. Meter is the blueprint; rhythm is the building.
Read it aloud, mark the stressed and unstressed syllables, group them into feet, then count the feet per line. Paste the line into the checker above to have that scansion done for you.
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