Poetic Meter Analyzer

Type in words. For each line you type, this program will do its best to categorize the line by its pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. It does this by retrieving the stress pattern or patterns for each word from an ordinary dictionary (maybe several dictionaries), and comparing all possible paths through the line to determine, for words with multiple possible stress patterns, which is most likely to be right. Or, which would lead to what patterns. [Aside: run spell checker before doing analysis.]

Oh, typing is getting me nowhere. Examles of desired behavior will do better.

[2020-12-26 FYI I've got rsi. hands don't do perfectly with typing anymore; please gracefully ignore typos.]

Let s mean weak. Let S mean strong.
Ex1 sSsSsSsSsS -> Iambic Pentameter (I5)
Ex2 SssSsSsSsS -> I5 with inversion at 1, notated ":invert [1]"
Ex3 SsSsSsSsSs -> Trochaic Pentameter (T5)

The program might assign a low probability to Ex2 actually being "anapestic something-ameter with very broken anapests and a leading strong syllable", as long as it still judges "I5 with inversion 1" most likely.

Mesuring whether something is I5 or near it can be implemented in terms of penalties for deviation from the expected form, but no idea yet what to do about meter that doesn't fit a strict pattern, or which is made up of multiple kinds of foot.

2020-12-26T12:58:46-0800 Beyond meter checkers, we can also have stanza-structure checkers, for more complicated forms like the sestina.