Poetry and metrics constitute a common area of philological study, but they have also been an area of investigation for linguistics, especially phonology. This is due to the fact that metrics renders itself a significant source of information which indirectly accesses the phonological knowledge of speakers. More concretely, it has been systematically observed that constructions found in the poetic traditions of the languages of the world correspond to constructions generally employed in their phonological systems (Fabb 2010).

Such correspondence has been observed between rhyming in metrics and reduplication in language. Rhyme generally refers to the phenomenon whereby the last words of two or more verses sound identical, from their primarily stressed vowel on, as in Greek ['krina] ‘lilies’ [ela'fina] ‘doe’ (Spatalas 1997). This phenomenon has not been as extensively studied as other metrical aspects in the relevant literature (Köhnlein & van Oostendorp 2014), while in Greek, its study is limited to philologically oriented work, e.g., Kokolis (1993).

The present webpage constitutes a first endeavor to document rhyme and its attested forms and patterns in Modern Greek through the use of quantitative data. At the same time, it aims at incorporating the phenomenon to the crosslinguistic typology of rhyme, seeking answers to questions such as: are paroxytone rhymes more frequent than oxytones and is there a correlation between specific rhyme types and rich inflectional morphology (Holtman 1996: 32)? Is the use of rich rhyme prevalent across poets, or is it limited to few, such as Lorentzos Mavilis (Spatalas 1997)?