After reading xkcd’s blog, I went to LimerickDB.com. It looks and works just like bash.org, but for limericks. Quite amused with some of the limericks available, I wanted to try and compose my own.

The first one came out fine, but I got stuck without a rhyme for the second one:

a man named guido once thought

he’d invent a language well wrought

indentation as tabs

Uhm, no luck there… “tabs” does not rhyme well. Then an idea came… I could create a rhyme index!

How to do it?

First, I took my already written word index. Last time I used it was to solve a substitution cipher for my crypto homework.

Then, I looked for the phonemes for each word, using espeak – a text to speech program:

lorg@kild:~$ espeak -q -x hello h@l'oU

After doing so, I collected words that had similar phonemes endings, and there it was, a rhyme index:

In [ 84 ] : words. get_word_rhymes ( "tabs" , word_index , rhyme_index ) [ : 10 ] Out [ 84 ] : [ 'crabs' , 'stabs' , 'macnabs' , 'dabs' , 'cabs' , 'scabs' , 'slabs' , 'arabs' , 'snobs' , 'thebes' ] In [84]: words.get_word_rhymes("tabs", word_index, rhyme_index)[:10] Out[84]: ['crabs', 'stabs', 'macnabs', 'dabs', 'cabs', 'scabs', 'slabs', 'arabs', 'snobs', 'thebes']

Note that better rhymes are listed first – according to the length of the match.

To create this list I didn’t use stress information, although with some more work it may be done.

Back to our limerick, we can see that “tabs” does not have really good rhymes. Better luck with indentation maybe:

In [ 86 ] : words. get_word_rhymes ( "indentation" , word_index , rhyme_index ) [ : 20 ] Out [ 86 ] : [ 'kishion' , 'alleviation' , 'expostulation' , 'machination' , 'syrophenician' , 'proposition' , 'infatuation' , 'computation' , 'mansion' , 'meditation' , 'aggression' , 'anticipation' , 'clarification' , 'logician' , 'gratulation' , 'discretion' , 'quotation' , 'presentation' , 'dissolution' , 'deprecation' ] In [86]: words.get_word_rhymes("indentation", word_index, rhyme_index)[:20] Out[86]: ['kishion', 'alleviation', 'expostulation', 'machination', 'syrophenician', 'proposition', 'infatuation', 'computation', 'mansion', 'meditation', 'aggression', 'anticipation', 'clarification', 'logician', 'gratulation', 'discretion', 'quotation', 'presentation', 'dissolution', 'deprecation']

And we get (not the best limerick I admit):

a man named guido once thought

he’d invent a language well wrought

with space indentation

and good presentation

we all got the language we sought

My original ending line was “it left all the perl hackers distraught”… but it ain’t true, so I gave it up. The ‘distraught’ was found with my script as well.

If you want to look for your own rhymes, then you can use my hacked-up script, although it isn’t written well enough for my taste. (For example, don’t expect to see documentation :)

I’ll upload a better version once I refactor it.

To save you the trouble of generating the word index and the rhyme index from scratch, I used cPickle to store them. You can use them for lookups regardless of the script.