Poetry Notebook

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
• 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.

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 or syllable count. 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.

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) against English Wiktionary: etymology and definitions grouped by part of speech. A "View on Wiktionary ↗" link is always shown alongside the parsed result.

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 built-in themes are included. An optional Datamuse "means like" online lookup (off by default) adds loosely related words.

Random

Draw a random rare/literary word from the same vocabulary pool used by Inspiration, 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.

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/poets-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

The plugin works without CMUdict, using an approximate heuristic instead, but CMUdict gives much more accurate syllable counts, stress, meter, and rhyme detection — and is required for Sonorities.

1. Download cmudict.dict from the official repository: https://github.com/cmusphinx/cmudict
2. Place it in your vault at any of the following (checked in this order):
   • <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/poets-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
3. In Settings → Poet's Notebook, click "Reload CMUdict" (or just reopen the panel).

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.

Changelog

• 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.