Poetry Notebook

An Obsidian plugin for writing and revising English poetry: syllable and meter analysis, rhyme search, synonyms and antonyms, definitions, thematic vocabulary, an experimental sound-pattern analyzer, and a quick-reference guide — all in a tabbed sidebar panel.

Sibling project to the French plugin "Carnet du Poète," built independently for English rather than as a translation or extension of it.

Sommaire

• Features
• Sonorities (experimental)
• Installation
• Setting up CMUdict
• Personal dictionary
• Settings
• Known limitations
• Development
• Changelog

Features

Syllables

Paste a poem and get, per line: a syllable count, meter (iambic / trochaic / anapestic / dactylic, named "pentameter," "tetrameter," etc.), and a rhyme scheme with colored badges. Analysis updates live as you type.

Syllable and stress data comes primarily from CMUdict (see below), with:

• an approximate heuristic fallback for words missing from CMUdict,
• an optional Datamuse online fallback for syllable counts only (off by default, toggled in Settings),
• a small built-in override list for common words CMUdict lists with a more formal syllable count than natural speech uses (e.g. "our," "fire"),
• automatic handling of the archaic -'d elision (e.g. "plann'd" → "planned").

Hover any line to see a per-word breakdown, including which source (CMUdict / override / heuristic / Datamuse) each word's syllable count came from.

Flip the card ("🔄 Sonorities" button, top-left) to switch to the sound-pattern panel described below.

Above the draft, the action bar offers Export (copies the analysis as a Markdown table), Copy, Active note (loads the selection in the open note, else its first ```poem block, else the whole note, with frontmatter and Markdown syntax stripped) and Clear. Each line shows its rhyme letter, its meter spelled out ("iambic trimeter") and its syllable count. Stanzas are separated by blank lines: below the lines, one row per stanza gives its rhyme scheme and names the common ones (couplets AABB, cross rhyme ABAB, enclosed rhyme ABBA). Continuous rhymes across stanzas (on by default) carries the letters on from one stanza to the next; off, each stanza restarts at A.

The Form menu (Syllables tab) checks the poem against a fixed form — Shakespearean, Petrarchan or Spenserian sonnet, villanelle, limerick, haiku, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ballad stanza — with a checklist above the analysis: ✓ rule met, ✗ rule broken, ⚠ point to check (things the engine can only estimate: stress-based meter, a syllable count one off, a rhyme only on the last unstressed syllable, refrains with changed wording). Line numbers in the checklist open the Rhymes tab on that line's last word. A form: property in a note (e.g. form: villanelle) sets the menu when the note is loaded with Active note.

Rhymes

Search CMUdict for perfect rhymes (matching stressed vowel and everything after it) and near/slant rhymes (consonance or assonance), grouped by syllable count. Near rhymes are always shown in a separate section unless "Strict rhyme mode" is on in Settings. Filter by starting letter, syllable count or part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb — needs Datamuse, since CMUdict has no part of speech; words whose part of speech is unknown are always kept). An optional Datamuse online lookup (off by default) adds any extra matches; a link opens the word's RhymeZone page in your browser for RhymeZone's own advanced filters.

The results say what kind of rhyme the word takes — masculine (one syllable from the stressed vowel: night), feminine (two: dancing) or triple (three: tenderly) — and keep apart identical rhymes, which also repeat the sound before the stressed vowel (night / knight, light / delight): unlike the French rime riche, English verse usually treats them as weak. Near rhymes are split into assonance (same stressed vowel: lake / fate) and consonance (same final consonants: shape / keep). In the Syllables tab, hovering a rhyme letter gives the rhyme's length, a red "identical" badge marks an identical rhyme, and the Form checklist flags them as a point to check.

Synonyms & Antonyms

Look up a word against your personal dictionary, with an optional Datamuse online lookup (off by default) shown as clickable chips — click one to save it. You can also add entries by hand. Saved entries can be removed with the × button.

Definitions

On-demand lookup (nothing is fetched until you search), with two sources switched by pills, like the French plugin's dictionaries: the Free Dictionary API (dictionaryapi.dev, built on Wiktionary — pronunciation, definitions with examples, synonyms/antonyms per part of speech), tried first, and the English Wiktionary page itself (etymology and definitions), used automatically when the first has no entry. An "Open on Wiktionary ↗" link is always available.

Inspiration

Type a common word (forest, sea, night, love, time, fire, weather, silence…) to get rarer, more literary vocabulary on the same theme, each with a short gloss. Ten hand-written themes are built in, and a published base adds about 950 more, one per category of Roget's Thesaurus (1911), each word with a short WordNet definition (downloaded once, like CMUdict — see Data sources). An optional Datamuse "means like" online lookup (off by default) adds loosely related words.

Random

Draw a random rare/literary word — about 6,300 from the published base (rare words of Roget's Thesaurus with WordNet definitions, some tagged archaic) plus the built-in and personal ones (about half are not in CMUdict: their syllables are estimated). Words tagged vulgar or sexual are left out of draws by default — remove those tags from "Exclude tags" to bring them in; the choice is remembered — with a gloss and quick links to look it up in Definitions or search it in Rhymes.

Every word — built-in or from your personal dictionary — can also carry your own custom tags on top of its theme, be marked ♥ liked, or 🚫 excluded from future draws. Tagging or excluding a built-in word never touches its definition; it's tracked separately. Filter the draw pool by included tags (switch between matching any or all of several at once), excluded tags, a "liked only" quick filter, or a "review excluded" mode to revisit what you've set aside — with a live count of how many words match the current filters.

Layout

Every tab follows the same layout as the French sibling plugin, Carnet du Poète: framed filter boxes, a "complete online" box whose ticked sources are remembered, and results in collapsible blocks, one per source (personal or built-in data first, then each online source). Online word lists can be clicked to leave a word out before saving them to your personal dictionary. In Synonyms, Datamuse results carry a relevance (Datamuse's score rescaled to 0-100 against the best match): a threshold (All / 30% / 60% / 85%) hides the weaker ones, and strong matches (70+) are shown in bold. In Inspiration, the Datamuse block also gives collocations — adjectives often used with the word, nouns it often qualifies, and words often found near it. In Inspiration, clicking words builds a selection (kept across searches) that can be added to a personal theme or as rare words.

Notes

Lists the words in your personal dictionary that have no note yet — rareWords and the words of your own vocabularyThemes — each with an inline field to add a short definition, saved straight to the dictionary file. Built-in themes always carry a note, so they never show up here.

Right-click on a word

Select a single word in the editor and right-click: Rhymes for "…" and Inspiration around "…" open the matching results in a pop-up, without leaving your note. Pop-ups use local data only (CMUdict and the vocabulary themes); no online lookup is made from them.

Guide

A static reference: meter and foot names, perfect vs. slant rhyme, classic poem forms (Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets, blank verse, villanelle, limerick), and a short note on poetic elision.

Sonorities (experimental)

A flip side of the Syllables tab's card: four sound patterns across the whole poem, not just line endings.

• Alliteration — a consonant sound repeated at the start of nearby words.
• Consonant web — a consonant sound that recurs anywhere in a word (attack, middle, or coda), not just at the start. Click a sound in its list to spotlight only its occurrences in the draft, dimming the rest.
• Internal assonance — a vowel sound that recurs inside nearby words, aside from end-of-line rhyme.
• Echo endings — word endings that echo each other mid-line, not just the established end-of-line rhyme (reuses the same rhyme-key logic as the Rhymes tab, applied to every word instead of just line-final ones).

Three grouping levels — exact ARPAbet sounds, simplified families, extended families with a voiced/voiceless split — each sound shown with a frequency ratio ("×N.N") comparing how often it occurs in this poem against its normal frequency in English, computed live from the loaded CMUdict index (no external citation needed for this — unlike the French sibling plugin, which has to lean on an older published study for lack of a better source).

Why "experimental": newer and less battle-tested than the rest of this plugin. Detection relies entirely on CMUdict's phoneme data — a word missing from CMUdict is skipped for Sonorities rather than guessed at from spelling, since English spelling-to-sound is too irregular to approximate safely the way this plugin's heuristic fallback does for basic syllable counts. Highlighting also colors the whole word rather than a precise letter range: CMUdict gives a word's phoneme identity, not a mapping back to letter positions, so there's no reliable way to know which letters correspond to a given sound the way the French plugin's orthographic scan can.

Installation

1. Copy main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css into a new folder at <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/poetry-notebook/.
2. In Obsidian, go to Settings → Community plugins, and enable "Poet's Notebook."
3. Open it from the ribbon icon (feather) or the command palette ("Open Poet's Notebook").

Setting up CMUdict

CMUdict gives accurate syllable counts, stress, meter and rhyme detection, and is required for Sonorities. It installs itself: when no cmudict.dict is found in the vault, the plugin downloads a compressed copy (about 1 MB) attached to its own GitHub release, checks it, and saves it as <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/poetry-notebook/cmudict.dict. This happens once, in the background; until then (or offline) syllable counts use an approximate heuristic, and the download is retried at the next start.

The same goes for the base vocabulary (poetry-notebook-base.json.gz, about 0.6 MB: Inspiration themes and Random words), downloaded into the plugin folder on first start and again only when a new version of it is published.

Network use: these downloads, and the online lookups you tick yourself (Datamuse, Free Dictionary API, Wiktionary), are the only requests the plugin makes. Nothing about your notes is sent anywhere.

You can still provide the file yourself (e.g. offline): download cmudict.dict from https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict and place it at any of these places (checked in this order):

• <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/poetry-notebook/cmudict.dict
• <vault>/.obsidian/cmudict.dict
• <vault>/cmudict.dict (vault root)
• anywhere else in the vault — the plugin falls back to a recursive filename search

then click Settings → Poet's Notebook → "Reload CMUdict".

CMUdict is public domain / unrestricted for research and commercial use.

Personal dictionary

The Synonyms tab writes to poets-notebook-dictionary.json automatically, but you can also create or edit this file by hand — for bulk-importing vocabulary, or adding entries no online lookup surfaces.

Where it's stored: same search order as cmudict.dict above. If no file is found anywhere in the vault, the first save creates one at the vault root. Override the path in Settings → Poet's Notebook → "Custom personal dictionary path," and re-scan at any time with "Reload personal dictionary."

Format:

{
  "synonyms": {
    "happy": ["joyful", "glad", "content", "cheerful"]
  },
  "antonyms": {
    "happy": ["sad", "miserable"]
  },
  "vocabularyThemes": [
    {
      "theme": "Mountains",
      "triggers": ["mountain", "mountains", "peak"],
      "words": [
        { "word": "crag", "note": "a steep, rugged rock or cliff" },
        { "word": "escarpment", "note": "a long, steep slope at the edge of a plateau" }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "rareWords": [
    { "word": "petrichor", "note": "the smell of rain on dry earth" }
  ],
  "wordMeta": {
    "petrichor": { "tags": ["favorite-sound"], "liked": true, "excluded": false }
  }
}

All five top-level keys are optional and can be combined in the same file:

• synonyms / antonyms — each key is a word (matched case-insensitively), each value an array of related words. Read and written by the Synonyms tab.
• vocabularyThemes — extends the Inspiration tab. triggers are the everyday words that surface the theme (matched case-insensitively, with simple plural stripping). Also feeds the Random tab's word pool.
• rareWords — standalone words for the Random tab's pool without building a full theme around them (shown with theme "Personal dictionary").
• wordMeta — per-word tags/liked/excluded state for the Random tab, applying to built-in words too. Written automatically by the Random tab's controls; editing it by hand is possible but not required for normal use.

A word cannot be saved as its own synonym or antonym through the UI.

Settings

• Allow Datamuse online lookups — enables the Datamuse fallback used for syllable counts on the Syllables tab when a word is missing from CMUdict.
• Strict rhyme mode — hides near/slant rhymes everywhere, showing only perfect rhymes.
• Custom CMUdict path / Reload CMUdict
• Custom personal dictionary path / Reload personal dictionary
• Rhyme colors — toggled from the Syllables tab itself (Structure face), not the Settings page: colors the rhyme-scheme badges by group.

Known limitations

• The Wiktionary definitions parser may come back empty or malformed for a word that clearly has a Wiktionary entry, use the "View on Wiktionary ↗" link in that case.
• Near-rhyme matching covers consonance and assonance only.
• Poetic elision handling currently covers the -'d → -ed pattern (e.g. "plann'd," "belov'd"); other archaic contractions (o'er, 'twas, e'er) are not yet normalized.
• No letter-level syllable splitting within a word — syllable counts are available, not syllable boundaries.
• Inspiration's built-in vocabulary covers ten themes; extend it via the personal dictionary's vocabularyThemes as needed.
• No personal-dictionary override for rhyme search yet — only CMUdict and Datamuse.
• Sonorities is experimental: CMUdict-only (no spelling-based fallback), and highlights whole words rather than precise letter ranges — see the Sonorities section above for why.

Development

The source lives in src/ as numbered files (engine, data, one file per tab, settings, plugin), assembled into main.js by plain concatenation:

node build.js

Tests (no dependencies, run against the built main.js and the repository's cmudict.dict):

node test/run.js

They cover syllables and meter, rhymes, whole-poem analysis, note import, fixed forms, sonorities, the parsing of online sources (with canned responses), personal-dictionary writes, and a smoke test that builds every tab. A GitHub workflow runs them on every push to dev or main, and the release workflow runs them again before publishing.

Edit the files in src/, never main.js directly. styles.css stays at the repository root; its first section is generated from Carnet du Poète's stylesheet with the cp- prefix renamed pn- (the command is in the file's header), so both plugins share one look without their classes colliding. A GitHub workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) publishes a release automatically when a push to main carries a manifest.json version that has no tag yet, using that version's entry in the changelog below as release notes.

Changelog

• 1.5.0 — CMUdict installs itself, a base vocabulary arrives, and rhymes get English finesse. CMUdict and a new base vocabulary (955 themes from Roget's Thesaurus for Inspiration, ~6,400 rare words for Random, WordNet definitions) are downloaded once into the plugin folder; only group slurs are removed, vulgar/sexual words are tagged and left out of Random draws by default. Rhymes: masculine / feminine / triple length, identical rhymes kept apart and flagged (Syllables badge, Form checklist), near rhymes split into assonance and consonance. Fix: a line ending with a closing quote lost its rhyme. Test suite (71 tests) run on every push and before each release.
• 1.4.1 — CSS lint fixes from Obsidian's plugin review (gap shorthand instead of row-gap/column-gap, dotted border instead of a two-value text-decoration). Same look.
• 1.4.0 — New Form menu in the Syllables tab: checks the poem against a fixed form (Shakespearean / Petrarchan / Spenserian sonnet, villanelle, limerick, haiku, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ballad stanza) with a ✓ / ✗ / ⚠ checklist and clickable line numbers; a form: note property sets it. Rhymes: part-of-speech filter (via Datamuse). Small spacing fix under the online-sources row.
• 1.3.1 — CSS lint fixes requested by Obsidian's plugin review: no more !important (more specific selectors instead) and no more :has() (toggle pills get an is-checked class from the code instead). Same look. README: install folder corrected to .obsidian/plugins/poetry-notebook/ (the plugin id).
• 1.3.0 — Layout and styles aligned with the French sibling plugin, Carnet du Poète, across all tabs (title, persistent tabs, framed filters, collapsible per-source results, word chips with syllable counts). Syllables: Export and Active note buttons, meter spelled out, per-stanza rhyme schemes with names, continuous-rhymes toggle. Definitions: Free Dictionary API first, Wiktionary as fallback. Inspiration: Datamuse collocations, word selection added to a theme or as rare words. Synonyms: relevance threshold, "rhymes with" and syllable filters. Random: quick-draw shortcuts, collapsible tag filters, tag presets, manual add, statistics. Ticked online sources are remembered.
• 1.2.0 — New Notes tab: personal-dictionary words without a note (rare words and personal theme words), each with an inline field to add one. Right-click a single selected word in the editor for Rhymes or Inspiration in a pop-up (local data only). Source split into src/ and assembled by node build.js; automatic GitHub release on push to main.
• 1.1.0 — New experimental Sonorities panel on the flip side of the Syllables tab's card: alliteration, consonant web, internal assonance, echo endings, with a live frequency-ratio badge per sound (see above). Random tab: words (built-in or personal) can now be tagged, liked, or excluded from the draw, with matching include/exclude filters. Ergonomics pass: checkboxes became pill-style toggles, secondary actions (Copy/Clear draft) became icon buttons, and the Syllables tab's action row moved above the textarea to match the French sibling plugin's layout. Fixed: several Sonorities palette colors had insufficient contrast with their white highlight text (as low as 2.54:1 against a 4.5:1 threshold) — darkened; and "Rhyme colors" was showing on both flip-card faces instead of just Structure.
• 1.0.2 — correction of readme. Added Antonyms (Datamuse rel_ant plus a personal-dictionary antonyms key), alongside Synonyms.
• 1.0.1 — small corrections
• 1.0.0 — Initial release: Syllables, Rhymes, Synonyms, Definitions, Guide, Inspiration, and Random tabs; CMUdict-based syllable/stress/meter engine; personal dictionary support.