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Diwani
ديواني
Arabic language · Product design · Development
A poetry editor built around the sixteen classical Arabic meters. Write a bayt and Diwani scans it as you type: each foot is named, every ziḥāf and ʿilla is marked where it falls, and the rhyme is checked against the poem’s rawī.
- Status
- Live · early preview
- Platform
- Web app, installable; works offline
- Languages
- Arabic interface, with English
- Our role
- Concept, prosody engine, product design, Arabic interface writing, development
The brief
Classical Arabic prosody has exact rules and almost no software that respects them. The tools that exist check a finished line, or reduce a meter to a string of symbols the poet has to decode.
We wanted an editor that behaves like an informed reader sitting beside the poet: one that knows the meter, names what it sees in the poet’s own terms, and never gets in the way of writing.
What we did
- Built the prosody engine: the sixteen meters with their tāmm and majzūʾ forms, every permitted ziḥāf and ʿilla, and the rules for where each may occur.
- Designed the writing page so the verdict reads as margin notes beside the poem, not as error messages.
- Wrote the Arabic interface with the terms poets already use (ṣadr, ʿajuz, ʿarūḍ, ḍarb, rawī), and an English interface for readers coming to Arabic poetry from outside.
- Built the library around it: saved qaṣāʾid, dīwāns, an ideas notebook and a rhyme lab, with local-first storage, cloud sync and backups.
Screens
Highlights
Scansion as you type
Each hemistich is scanned live. Feet appear beneath the line, with the matching form highlighted and any fault pointed to the letter that caused it.
Rhyme, checked
Diwani finds the poem’s rawī and its vowel, flags a bayt that breaks from them, and suggests words on the same rawī that complete the ʿajuz you are writing.
The table mode
An alternative view drops the letters of a bayt into their feet one by one, for teaching, checking, and the pleasure of seeing the meter laid bare.
Bahr detection
Paste any bayt and Diwani names its meter, or lists the closest ones when the verse does not scan cleanly.
Language tools
Auto-diacritization, a unified dictionary, synonyms and antonyms, and a poetry lexicon, each opening beside the poem.
Export and print
Qaṣāʾid export to Word or print as PDF, in parallel or staggered layouts and a choice of classical typefaces.
Where it stands
Diwani is live as an early preview and already in daily use by its first poets. The Arabic interface is being revised word by word, and the next releases add a prosody report for the whole poem and version history.
Built withJavaScript, single-page appProgressive Web App, offline-firstSupabase for syncNetlify