Hi, I’m Eliot. I have made some poetic writing tools, mostly by programming in Python. I think being able to search for words flexibly by rhyme, meter, and meaning can be very useful for certain kinds of comedic, poetic, or mnemonic writing. I wish I had a text editor that handled words by their sound and meaning instead of just their spelling.
All of the outputs and examples below come from tools I’ve developed from scratch in Python (plus sometimes Google’s Word2Vec).
Wordle Journey
Discover how many words you had left after each round of Wordle! (Code)
puns.plus
Snow leopard? More like blizzard lizard, storm stork, or arctic shark!
This search finds similar sounding pairs of words drawn from given categories. e.g., “Find a [name] that sounds like a [sea creature]”
- Carol / coral
- Gail / whale
- Steven / sturgeon
- Phyllis / fish
See blog post here and examples gallery here.
(Uses Google’s Word2vec for word meaning association.)
Iambic improv
Text generation using an RNN model constrained to stay in Shakespearean meter.
I humbly set a thought upon the world
Of many hundred words that men have heard.
Found Poems
Ballads, couplets, limericks, and sonnets that I found hiding in real text. I wrote a Python program to search a large body of text by meter and rhyme. Given a target rhyme scheme and text corpus, I can go through the candidate lines and assemble them verbatim into poems.
e.g., from a cardiology textbook: adverse effects
develop due
to age and sex—
(see Figure 2).
Poetic search
A phonetic word search that is the backbone of the tools below. I made a phonetic vectorization algorithm to let you search for sound repetition more flexibly than just alliteration or rhyme.
clam :: clan, clamor, clamp, glam, clad, clanged, clarinet
tremulous :: emulates, tremor, stimulus, premise, trembling, nemesis
medicine :: Mendelssohn, medalist, mend, menace, Addison
chameleon :: comedian, ameliorate, menial, concealment
Weird A.I. Yankovic
A tool for finding absurd combinations of words that sound like a given song lyric or book title (or any phrase). It scans across a phrase to find words that combine to fit it.
- “Under Pressure” -> “Um, Depression”
- “Call Me Maybe” -> “Calming Baby”
- modus operandi -> modems propaganda
- bon appétit -> balm ample teeth
Meaning mates
If you input a pair of words like (“will”, “way”), this search returns pairs of words that sound like “will” and “way,” respectively, and have associated meanings. Allowing you to make puns on idioms as in:
- Where there’s a skill there’s a trade.
- Where there’s a milk there’s a whey.
- Where there’s a witch there’s a mage.
- Where there’s an April there’s a May.
Mathematically, this is just the converse of the puns.plus “Perfect Pairs” search. (Search sound sets for meaning pairs, vs. search meaning sets for sound pairs.) As a fun aside, that is exactly how I discovered you could do it: I mixed up the order of my inputs and this search came out by accident.