You know the rhyme scheme of your own song the way you know the shape of your own handwriting — implicitly, and usually wrong. Put it on paper and the surprises show up fast: the chorus you thought was ABAB is actually AABB with a stray line, the bridge has four different endings and none of them come back, and line six of the second verse quietly rhymes with nothing at all.
This mapper reads a finished lyric and labels it. Every line gets a letter — the first end sound in a section is A, the next new one B, and so on — plus the sound itself, so you can see why two lines were grouped. Blank lines and [Chorus] markers split the song into sections, and each one gets its own scheme: you get “the verse is ABAB, the chorus is AABB” rather than one long string that restarts the alphabet halfway through.
It runs entirely in your browser. There is no upload, no account and no queue: the words stay in a textarea, the file is generated on your own machine, and what you get back is a plain .txt or .csv you can open anywhere. I cannot see what you paste.
Paste a lyric to get started.
Nothing mapped yet.
Letters restart at A in every section, so a verse and a chorus are each read on their own. Amber rows use a rhyme sound that appears nowhere else in what you pasted — the line rhymes with nothing. That is sometimes the point, and sometimes a line you meant to rhyme.
Your text never leaves the browser. There is no upload anywhere in the code on this page, and no server receives what you paste.
There is no save button, because there is no account. That also means no autosave — export before you close the tab or you will be doing it again.
Reading a map without over-trusting it
Six things worth knowing before you change a line because of a letter.
- Map one section at a time when you are checking, and the whole song when you are looking for patterns. A song-wide map shows you whether your verses and your choruses actually differ.
- Go after the lonely letters first. A rhyme sound used exactly once is either a deliberate wild line or a line you meant to rhyme and did not. Both are worth a decision rather than an accident.
- Remember it reads spelling, not sound. Love and move are an eye rhyme and will be grouped; through and tough look identical and will be grouped too, even though they do not rhyme at all. Your ear overrules the tool every time.
- Try the loose setting when a whole section comes back as lonely letters. Matching on the last syllable only is how most pop and hip-hop rhyme actually behaves — morning, warning and ringing are one sound to a listener even though the syllable before it is different every time.
- Watch for the accidental pattern. Four lines that come back AAAA usually means you ran out of rhymes rather than made a choice, and it is the fastest way to spot a verse that has stopped moving.
- Export the CSV when you are rewriting. Having line numbers, sounds and letters in a spreadsheet makes it much easier to see which two lines you need to change, and whether the change breaks something further down.
Why bother naming the scheme
What a letter per line actually buys you.
A rhyme scheme is the skeleton of a section. It is why a chorus feels settled and a bridge feels unstable, why one verse reads as narrative and another as a list. Writers absorb this by ear over years, and a map is a way of borrowing that ear — you can see at a glance that your chorus resolves and your bridge deliberately does not.
The letters also make arguments possible. “This verse drags” is hard to act on; “this verse is AABB AABB AABB and the chorus is the same shape, so nothing changes” is a specific problem with a specific fix. Pattern recognition is most of editing, and patterns are much easier to see written down than heard.
The honest limit: this tool works from the ends of words as they are spelled. English spelling and English sound have a famously loose relationship, so it will group bough with cough and split love from dove when sung as duhv. Treat the output as a very good first guess that you confirm by reading the lines out loud — which you were going to do anyway.
Common questions
Is my lyric uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole tool runs in your browser. Your text stays in a textarea, the file is built on your own machine when you press Download, and nothing is sent to a server at any point. The site still runs analytics and cookies like any other site — those are described in the privacy policy — but your words are not part of them.
How does it decide what rhymes?
From the written tail of the last word on each line: everything from the second-to-last vowel group to the end, with plurals and possessives stripped and y treated as a vowel where it is doing that job. That makes time and rhyme one sound, and song and long another. The loose setting drops to the last vowel group only, which catches the way most contemporary writing actually rhymes.
Why does it say two lines rhyme when they do not?
Because their spellings agree and their sounds do not. Through and tough, love and move, here and there — these are eye rhymes, and a tool reading letters cannot tell. Reading the lines out loud is the check, and the letters are there to make that reading faster rather than to replace it.
What counts as a lonely line?
A rhyme sound that appears exactly once in what you pasted. It shows up amber in the list and marked rhymes with nothing in the summary. It is not automatically a mistake — a lot of good songs end a section on a line that deliberately does not resolve — but it should be a decision rather than a surprise.
Does it handle internal rhyme and multi-syllable rhyme?
No. This looks only at the last word of each line, which is where end rhyme lives. Internal rhyme inside a line, and multi-syllable rhymes like education and revelation, are usually picked up anyway because the shared tail is long enough, but they are not analysed separately.
Can I use it for rap?
Yes, with the loose setting on. Rap commonly rhymes on the final syllable only and stacks internal rhymes inside the bar, so the strict setting will over-split. For how dense the writing is — syllables per bar and where the gaps fall — use the Rap Flow Density Calculator alongside it.
Back to writing
If you landed here before you had words to work on, these are the generators people start with.
- Emotion, Love & Faith29
- Everyday Life & Places21
- World, Latin & Afro19
- Holidays & Seasons17
- Story, Fantasy & Worlds16
- Hip-Hop & Rap15
- Occasions & Milestones15
Or go back to the full list of tools, the generators I use most, or the most recent batch.