Meter Maker

Tap out the rhythm of a line of verse, which beats are stressed, which fall away.

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How to play

Each line is split into syllables. Mark every syllable as stressed or unstressed to scan the line correctly, revealing its metrical pattern, the steady da-DUM of an iamb or the lilt of other feet.

Click a syllable to toggle it between stressed and unstressed
Match the line's true metrical pattern
Identify the rhythm, iambic, trochaic and more
Scan every line right to complete the round

Controls

Desktop: click or tap a syllable to mark its stress; keyboard shortcuts speed up scanning
Phone & tablet: tap each syllable to toggle it

Game modes

Daily: a shared seeded poem ranked globally
Practice: fresh lines each round across Easy, Medium and Hard

Tips & strategy

Say the line aloud and exaggerate the beat, your voice naturally lands on the stresses
Most English verse alternates, so a stressed syllable usually follows an unstressed one
Content words tend to be stressed; small function words like 'the' and 'of' usually aren't

What you'll learn

Meter Maker teaches poetic meter through hands-on scansion, training you to hear and mark the stresses that give verse its rhythm.

Skills: poetic meter, scansion, stressed and unstressed syllables, prosody
Best for: roughly grades 6–12 (ages 11+)
For parents & teachers: a rare, practical way to teach scansion and meter.

Origins

Marking syllables stressed or unstressed to reveal a line's pattern is scansion, and what it reveals is the line's metre — the steady da-DUM of the iamb or the lilt of another foot.

Working syllable by syllable, rather than naming the metre outright, is the original method.

That is how scansion is actually done and why it is taught. Metre is a pattern in the stresses English already puts on words, not a rhythm imposed on them — so you find it by listening to the line honestly, including the places where the poet departs from the pattern on purpose.