Sonnet checker

The sonnet (Italian sonetto, “little song”) took shape in thirteenth-century Sicily and was popularized by Petrarch in the fourteenth century. Early Italian practice settled on fourteen lines with a turn of thought (volta) and a fixed rhyme pattern — typically an octave and sestet in the Petrarchan form.

Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey brought the form into English in the sixteenth century. Surrey’s three-quatrain-plus-couplet shape, later associated with Shakespeare, became the dominant English teaching model: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a closing couplet.

English classrooms usually treat the sonnet as fourteen lines of iambic pentameter plus a named rhyme scheme (Shakespearean ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, Petrarchan ABBAABBA + sestet, or Spenserian interlocking). Modern poets often keep the line count and meter while loosening or dropping rhyme.

In lyriic’s catalog, a sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter: ten syllables per line with expected stress on positions 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 (da-DUM × 5).

That matches the English teaching backbone shared by Shakespearean, Petrarchan, and Spenserian sonnets. Those traditions differ mainly in rhyme scheme and where the volta falls — not in the default meter.

lyriic enforces line count, syllable target, and the iambic stress contour when the stress pack is loaded. It does not score ABAB/CDCD patterns, octave–sestet splits, or theme rules.

An iamb is a two-syllable foot with a light beat then a strong one: da-DUM. Everyday words such as “today,” “because,” and “away” often fall into that shape.

Stack iambs and you get iambic meter. Three feet make trimeter (six syllables), four make tetrameter (eight), five make pentameter (ten)—the backbone of blank verse, sonnets, and much English lyric.

When stress-aware checking is on, lyriic marks the expected weak–strong pairs from dictionary stress and compares them to the meter’s contour. Real speech bends the ideal; the marks show the target pattern, not a claim that every poem must be perfectly regular.

Iambic pentameter expects five da-DUM feet: ten syllables with strong beats on positions 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10. It is the default contour for blank verse, English sonnets, and heroic couplets in this catalog.

lyriic checks that ten-slot weak–strong grid when the stress pack is loaded; substitutions and feminine endings are common in practice and will show as mismatches against the ideal.

lyriic does not enforce rhyme schemes (Shakespearean, Petrarchan, Spenserian), volta placement, or thematic “argument” structure — only line count, syllable target, and iambic stress.