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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Meter in poetry is the recurring rhythmic pattern of stressed (´) and unstressed (˘) syllables in a line of verse. Scansion is the practical craft of marking those beats on the page to hear how a poem moves.
Poets group syllables into small repeating units called metrical feet. Name the foot, count how many feet sit in the line, and you have named the meter. Five iambic feet makeiambic pentameter, the ten-syllable workhorse of English sonnets and blank verse.
Meter is the fixed blueprint. Rhythm is what your actual words, pauses, and substitutions do against that blueprint when read aloud.
A metrical foot is a two-syllable or three-syllable unit of stressed and unstressed beats. Four core feet build almost all English metrical verse: the iamb (da-DUM, as in "re-VEAL"), the trochee(DUM-da, as in "TY-ger"), the anapest (da-da-DUM, as in "un-der-STAND"), and the dactyl(DUM-da-da, as in "MUR-mur-ing"), with the two-stress spondee (DUM-DUM) acting as a common substitution.
The second half of a meter's name counts how many feet sit in a single line: monometer (one foot),dimeter (two feet), trimeter (three feet), tetrameter (four feet),pentameter (five feet), and hexameter (six feet). Combine the foot and the count and you get names like iambic pentameter(five iambs, ten syllables) or trochaic tetrameter (four trochees, eight syllables).
Not every poem relies on fixed metrical feet. Visual forms like those in ourconcrete poem examples arrange words by shape on the page, while free verse organizes rhythm through line breaks and phrasing. If you are drafting new verse for upcoming poetry contests, our curated list ofwords for poets can help you swap flat words for multi-syllable alternatives that fit your target meter.
| Recognized 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, and when verse promotes a function word onto a beat, 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 our good words to rhyme withfinder. Lines whose end words share a sound share a letter (ABAB, AABB), eye rhymes like "love" and "move" are kept apart, and slant rhymes are flagged in lowercase.
Meter in poetry is the organized rhythmic structure of a line of verse, measured by the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. Poets group these syllables into repeating units called metrical feet (such as iambs, trochees, anapests, and dactyls) and count how many feet appear in each line.
Iambic pentameter is a ten-syllable line made of five iambic feet (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM), where each foot pairs an unstressed syllable with a stressed syllable. It is the most common meter in English poetry and blank verse drama, used extensively by Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.
Meter is the fixed, recurring blueprint of stressed and unstressed beats that a poem sets up. Rhythm is the actual sound and movement of the line when read aloud, including every natural pause, caesura, and deliberate substitution against that blueprint.
Read the poem aloud in a natural voice and mark the syllables your voice leans on as stressed and the lighter syllables as unstressed. Group the marks into repeating two-syllable or three-syllable feet, then count the feet per line. You can also paste your lines into the Meter Checker above to scan every word automatically.
Classic poems with strong, regular meter include Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 (iambic pentameter), Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' and Longfellow's 'The Song of Hiawatha' (trochaic tetrameter), Lord Byron's 'The Destruction of Sennacherib' and Clement Clarke Moore's 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' (anapestic tetrameter), Tennyson's 'The Charge of the Light Brigade' (dactylic dimeter), and Emily Dickinson's 'Because I could not stop for Death' (common meter).
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