I · The pair
Three hundred and twenty-one times
This began with every Romanian poem on Wikisource whose author is out of copyright, from the seventeenth-century metropolitan Dosoftei to poets who died before 1956. That comes to 5,794 poems by 79 poets, 233,276 lines of verse and just under 89,000 rhymes, each one checked inside its own stanza: two lines count as rhyming only if their endings actually match from the stressed vowel onward.
The pair that turns up most often is lume / nume, world and name. It appears 321 times, in Anton Pann and in Eminescu, in Bolintineanu and in Coșbuc, across ballads, rondels and love poems. The runners-up are just as worn: bine / mine, well and me; foc / loc, fire and place; pământ / vânt, earth and wind.
This is not laziness. A heavily used rhyme is nearly always one the language hands over for free: short old words for things poetry talks about anyway. The interesting part is something else, which is how little room Romanian leaves in exactly the places poets return to most.
II · The veins
Five words for earth
Every rhyme belongs to a family of sound: the part that repeats, running from the stressed vowel to the end of the word. The corpus holds 853 such families, and they are nothing like one another.
The -ânt family is used 1,061 times. For all of that, Romanian supplies twenty-eight words that show up at the end of a line more than once, and the first five of them, pământ, vânt, mormânt, cuvânt, sfânt — earth, wind, grave, word, holy — carry 78% of the traffic. A poet writing about the earth in Romanian has roughly four ways to continue, and all four are already taken.
The narrowest family in the whole corpus is -eu. It has eight words and is used 336 times, with meu, eu, greu, vreu and leu — my, I, heavy, I want, lion — accounting for 96% on their own. When a Romanian poet lands on eu, the word for I, at the end of a line, the language offers seven replies and no more.
Set side by side, the families split cleanly in two. Some are wide: -ită and -ite, the participle endings, where the language has hundreds of words and no pair repeats much, because none has to. Others are narrow and deep, polished smooth by use.
Top left is the poetry everyone recites at school concerts. Bottom right is the rest of the language, waiting.
III · The tail
Three quarters of all rhymes are heard once
After a list like that it would be easy to conclude that Romanian poetry rhymes in circles. The numbers say the opposite. Of 48,333 distinct pairs, 37,655 occur exactly once in the entire corpus: one poet, one stanza, and nobody after him.
The first 100 pairs cover 8% of the rhyming, and the first 1,000 reach a quarter. The remaining three quarters of the work is done with rare pairs. That is where the reasons for reading old poetry live.
Topîrceanu rhymes colacii with vârcolacii, the loaves with the werewolves, because he is Topîrceanu. Ilarie Voronca sets rațiune beside migrațiune, reason beside migration, because he enjoys the sound of an office word in a line about swallows. Neither pair appears a second time anywhere in the corpus.
IV · The lookup
What poets rhymed with your word
Type any Romanian word. If a poet in the corpus ended a line with it, you get everything that ever answered it, with the couplet attached. Nothing here is generated: every pair was written by someone, in a particular stanza.
Those seven are a place to start: longing, window, snowfall, solitude, forest, sea, silence. The most sociable word in the corpus is mare, which means both sea and large, and which poets have rhymed with 266 different words.
V · The poets
Who leans on ready-made rhyme
Once the common rhymes are known, each poet can be asked how often he reaches for them. The measure below is the share of a poet's rhymes that fall among the corpus's 300 most-worn pairs, recomputed each time without his own contribution so that nobody is measured against himself. Only poets born between 1840 and 1900 are shown, since otherwise the comparison would run across different stages of the language.
Alexandru Vlahuță leads, with Duiliu Zamfirescu just behind: close to one rhyme in five of theirs is a rhyme everybody uses. At the other end sits George Ranetti, who spent his career writing epigrams and parodies for the satirical weekly Furnica, at 6.3%. What separates them is trade rather than talent: a joke dies if the audience can guess the second line, so a comic poet is forced to look further afield.
Eminescu, the poet Romanians quote by heart, comes out in the middle at 14%, below Coșbuc and below Goga. It is a result worth sitting with: most of what a Romanian reader remembers of Eminescu rests on what he did with rhymes anyone had to hand.
VI · How it was made
Method, briefly
The texts come from the Romanian Wikisource archive, downloaded on 4 August 2026. From it were kept the pages marked with an author and set as verse, then only authors in the public domain: those who died in or before 1955, plus a few older ones with reliable birth dates. Translations were removed, since the rhymes in a Romanian Dante belong to the translator rather than to Dante.
Rhyme is read off the stanza itself, never looked up. Within each stanza, line endings no more than four lines apart are compared, and only mutually-best pairs are kept, meaning pairs for which no better match exists in that stanza. Two words rhyme when the stretch from the stressed vowel onward is identical, and stress is estimated with the ordinary rules of the language: words ending in a consonant take the accent on the final vowel, words ending in e, ă or u take it a syllable earlier. In rising diphthongs the accent falls on the second element, which is why ceas answers rămas, and moarte answers parte.
Older spelling was modernised before counting, so that pămînt and pământ would not register as two words, and lines where the poet swallowed an initial î were restored, returning -nchine to închine. A handful of nineteenth-century forms that are not really -eu rhymes at all, such as seu for său, were folded into their modern spellings. Pages transcribed without diacritics were set aside.
The method has a limit it knows about. Rhymes resting on a single vowel, as in a cânta with a pleca, only count when the words also share the consonant before it, since otherwise a rhyme could not be told from a coincidence. And words stressed on the antepenultimate syllable but ending in a consonant, a small class, can produce the occasional false pair. Of sixty pairs drawn at random and checked one by one, all sixty were genuine rhymes.
The texts are licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, as all of Wikisource is.
Marius Comper · 17 August 2026
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