• Rhyme
• Rhyme words
• Irregular rhymes
• Technical Method

Rhymes are represented in capitals and without accents or apostrophes. For instance A, E, I, O, U on their own all stand for single accented vowels in rhyme, with or without apostrophes: E includes the rhyme in fé, fe', è, me, etc., all of which regularly rhyme with each other in the texts. Either upper- or lowercase characters can be used for searching.

Examples:

These all involve the use of wildcard characters:

• Enter _ (underscore, standing for any single character) in the Rhyme box with Match whole fields to produce all rhymes consisting in a single accented vowel.
• Enter %[bcdfglmnprstvxz] in the Rhyme box with Match whole fields to show all rhymes ending in a consonant (not many).
• Enter A% in the Rhyme box with Match whole fields to produce all lines with A-rhymes in the texts--though without further restrictions you will need to run the search more than once, since there are more than 30,000 such lines in the database: see Searching instructions. Carrying on through the other vowels will give the overall distribution of accented vowels in rhyme in the database, which can then be compared with the distribution in individual texts.

In the case of partial or imperfect rhymes, the majority instance is used: see Irregular rhymes below. See the instructions about Word accents for a way of searching for proparoxytonic rhymes (rime sdrucciole).

Rhyme words are represented in lower case only, since the programme that identified them could not distinguish between common and proper nouns. In the case of composite rhymes, e.g. re di for the rhyme EDI (Orlando furioso, 45.1.5), all the words involved are included. As always, either upper- or lowercase characters can be used for searching.

Examples:

These also involve the use of wildcard characters:

• Enter a single blank in the Rhyme word box with Match any part to find all cases where more than one word makes up the rhyme, such as Ariosto's re di referred to above.
• Enter  _'_  (an apostrophe between two underscores), still with Match any part, to find all rhymes with an internal apostrophe (generally followed by an enclitic pronoun): e.g. rife'mi in Purgatorio 12.7 (the underscores on either side stand for any characters, and are necessary in order to exclude rhyme words beginning or ending with an apostrophe).
• Enter a single hyphen with Match any part in the Rhyme word box, to find the few examples of broken rhymes, where the rhyme word is hyphenated and split between the end of one line and the beginning of the next; for instance, the differente- at the end of Paradiso 24.16.

Irregular rhymes involving more than one word (composite rhymes) and rhymes with internal apostrophes can be found using the search methods illustrated in the section above. In addition to these the database contains a number of other irregular rhymes, which are listed below.

In the Divina Commedia these irregular rhymes belong to the conventional 'Sicilian' type. In the Amorosa visione there is a serious philological basis for the readings in question, and similarly in the Orlando innamorato. It should be noted, however, that in the more recent Tissoni Benvenuti and Montagnani edition of the Innamorato (see Texts) half of the irregular rhymes have been eliminated, though they remain in instances 1, 2, 4 (ridopia replaces ridoppia), 5, 7 (treamilia for tre millia), 8, 9, 13, 19 (vincieno for vinceno) and 20. In the Conquistata they are probably editorial errors, especially given that there are no such irregular rhymes in the text of the Liberata.

In the cases of the Divina Commedia, the Amorosa visione and the Orlando innamorato, therefore, these irregular rhyme words have been left unchanged in the database. In the case of the Conquistata they have been changed to the version indicated in square brackets; the changes follow the matching lines in the Liberata in the first four instances (there are no matching lines for the remainder). Corresponding changes have been made to the Scanned line in each case (on which the phoneme fields are all based), but not to the related Line field, which remains as it is in the printed edition from which the text is taken.

The rhymes in all these cases have been recorded as follows: where two lines are involved, the second rhyme has been treated as an instance of the first; where three lines are involved, the odd rhyme out has been counted as an instance of the majority rhyme. For instance, in the Divina Commedia all three endings in the sequence duri : sicuri : fori (Purgatorio 19.77-81) have been treated as examples of the rhyme URI.

The near-phonological nature of Italian spelling, together with the relative simplicity of the rules for rhyme in traditional Italian metrics, mean that rhyme in Italian is susceptible of almost the same degree of electronic processing as the phonemic representations contained in the database (see Phonemic patterns). Once the computer program knows which lines are supposed to rhyme with each other, it can identify the rhymes automatically with a very high rate of success, simply by reading off the matching characters from the ends of the lines in question. For instance, starting from the first five lines of a text in terza rima, the program is 'told' that lines 1 and 3 rhyme with each other, and lines 2, 4 and 6, and so on, and for the most part it correctly identifies the rhymes by reading the last words of rhyming line backwards, stopping after the last (in reverse order) matching vowel from the end.

There are a number of cases, though relatively very few, where this does not work, or does not work completely. Irregular rhymes, as discussed in the section above, have to be corrected by hand, on the basis of a warning that the program produces where it fails to find a specified minimum number of matching characters; equally a warning is produced, and corrections may have to be made, when more than a specified maximum of matching characters are found: for instance, when the program identifies a rhyme EMENZA, which then has to be corrected by hand to ENZA.