Bàrdachd: Poetry & Rhyme

Bàrdachd is a workshop for writing poetry in metre and rhyme. You write the draft; it shows you how the lines actually scan, finds the rhymes worth having, and keeps a form's rules beside you while you work. And when a poem is finished — yours or anyone's — it helps you learn it by heart. One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac. Buy it once and it is on every device you write on, with your poems kept in step through your own iCloud — no subscription, no account, nothing more to pay. SEE THE METRE AS YOU WRITE Every line is scanned as you type. Each stress mark sits directly over the syllable it belongs to, words are split where their syllables divide, and stressed syllables are set bolder, so the pattern reads at a glance instead of having to be counted out. Beats and syllables are reported as two separate numbers, because they are two different things. Bàrdachd names the metre it hears — iambic pentameter, trochaic tetrameter, and so on — and shows where a line departs from it. YOU HAVE THE FINAL SAY ON EVERY WORD The pronunciation dictionary covers 126,000 words, but dictionaries are not poets. "Heaven" is two syllables on paper and one in half the lines ever written. So any word can be corrected by hand: tap it, set its syllables and which of them carry a beat, and the whole app reads it your way from then on. Words the dictionary doesn't know — Gaelic and Scots words, place names, coinages — are estimated from their spelling and marked, so you can always see when a count is a guess. A RHYME FINDER THAT GIVES YOU WORDS Perfect rhymes are ranked by how common each word is, so "heart" gives you part, start, art and apart, not a list of surnames and abbreviations. Near rhymes are scored on how close both the vowel and the closing consonants are, and only close ones are kept: hard, card, guard, regard. THIRTEEN FORMS, WITH GUIDANCE BESIDE THE DRAFT Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets, the villanelle, triolet, sestina, ballad stanza, heroic couplet, ottava rima, rhyme royal, blank verse, limerick, haiku and the free-metre quatrain. Pick one and the guidance sits beside your draft; move the cursor to a line and the guidance for that line is highlighted — its rhyme, its length, whether it's a refrain. Each form comes with a public-domain example, from Shakespeare and Milton to Hardy and Yeats. Not sure what you've written? Bàrdachd can suggest which form a draft is closest to. LEARN A POEM BY HEART The words are hidden and come back a line at a time: tap for the next line, step back if you went too far, or ask for a hint — the first letter of every word, enough to jog the line without giving it away. Learn your own poems, the classic examples, or any poem you paste in. BUILT FOR WRITING • No save button. Every change is saved within a second, and a quiet "Saved" tells you so. • A two-column layout on iPad and Mac: draft and guidance on the left, analysis on the right. On iPhone the poem gets the whole screen while you write, and the analysis is a tap away. • Set the poem's text size to suit you, separately on each device. • Buy once, write anywhere: start a poem on the train on your iPhone and finish it at your desk on the Mac. Your poems sync through your own iCloud account. • Export as plain text or PDF. • Writing exercises, and reading lists, websites and listening to learn from, with room for your own additions. PRIVATE There's no account and no sign-in, and there are no ads, analytics or tracking. The dictionary, the scansion and the rhyme finder all live inside the app and work without a connection. Your poems are kept on your devices and in your own private iCloud database, which nobody else — the developer included — can read. Pronunciations are based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary. Word frequencies come from wordfreq by Robyn Speer and contributors.