Some day I may turn this into a chrome extension to highlight limericks on arbitrary pages. It would be joyous to see a highlighted section of some random wikipedia page pop out to be a limerick!

As someone who was drawn back into programming by the NLTK while in a creative writing program, I say bravo!

This one especially moved me:

  Amorite and the Girgasite
  And the Hivite and the Arkite
  and the Sinite And
  the Arvadite and
  the Zemarite and the Hamathite

I imagine it would be fun to do this with heroic couplets, too. If I'm not mistaken, I think the idea has been applied to random tweets.

I made a bot that would fetch Twitter posts and re-tweet any it detected were 5-7-5 haiku. The syllable counter was just a series of regex replacements, loosely inspired by Metaphone, but it was about 95% accurate on my dictionary of 300,000 words.

Have you seen the New York Times haikubot? (Maybe you wrote it?)

I think the rhyme definition is wrong. To me a rhyme has to be have the same phonemes from the coda of the last accented syllable to the end of the line.

Yes, without accent detection, the 'limericks' it finds can generally only be read with forced stresses, and the rhyming schemes it winds up with can be quite weak (rhyming an unstressed 'the' at the end of two lines, for example).

Ironically, by not knowing how to properly handle a stress-unstress syllable pair at the end of a line, this program would completely miscue on any limericks it finds with a first line that ends in 'Nantucket'

If you like this you might like https://twitter.com/anagramatron

And https://twitter.com/pentametron

What are these anagrams for? What's the subject?

It appears that it retweets pairs of tweets that anagram each other. The tumblr page shows it more clearly:

http://anagramatron.tumblr.com/

Yandex has Autopoet that writes poems using search queries as dictionary.

http://autopoet.yandex.ru/ It supports quite some poetic forms including limerick.

Unfortunately it only handles Russian. But poems are actually pretty awesome.

Is there a (freely available) online dictionary(?) which gives the pronunciation of English words?

Get the CMU pronouncing dictionary as explained in the README: https://github.com/DanielleSucher/Nantucket/

I think nearly all dictionaries show a pronunciation guide via IPA:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/banana

Pronunciation/bəˈnɑː.nə/