Sanskrit metres

Metre identifier

Type a Sanskrit verse into the box below and click the button.
(The input can be in either Devanagari, IAST, Harvard-Kyoto, or ITRANS format.)
(You can use this tool, or “Sanscript”, to verify your transliteration.)

Resources for learning more about Sanskrit metres

See this playlist. There is also some incidental mention at around 10:00 in this video.

For a good/large list of metres, see the list of about 775 metres in H. D. Velankar's Jayadaman, or V. S. Apte's dictionary (revised and enlarged), Appendix A.I (100+ metres) and A.II (800+ metres). Also, Anand Mishra's tool has a list of 1352 metres, all vṛttas (of unclear provenance).

For a matchless work on the aesthetics of metre, see (in Kannada) Chandogati by Sediyapu Krishna Bhat.

The most important Sanskrit metres

As evident from the tables here, a few Sanskrit metres account for most of the Sanskrit literature. (To be continued….)

Introduction

This is intended to be a website dealing with Sanskrit metres.

In its current state, this is all very raw; work in progress. Source code at https://github.com/shreevatsa/sanskrit/