Best Smartphone Apps for Poetry Writing

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Writing poetry goes all-in on technology with apps for tablets and smartphones that give poets all kinds of new-fangled tools, along with apps for old-school necessities like thesauruses and dictionaries. These apps are designed as tools to help you to bring your A-game to your writing.

Project Metaphor

This app, for both Apple and Android, is really a game that's fun for word fiends to play—and it is said to encourage creative thinking as a side bonus. Each day the first part of a ​simile or ​metaphor is posted on the main page of the app and then users complete it. It's fun and keeps those figurative language juices flowing.

Poet's Pad

Intended for both writer-poets and speaker-poets, Dante Varnado Moore’s Poet’s Pad has an integrated rhyming dictionary and thesaurus, a “unique emotion-based word and phrase generator,” editing and word-processing functions, and a digital audio recorder for poets who would rather speak than write.

Verses Notebook + Book of Rhymes

Derek Kepner’s Verses app has fewer bells and whistles than Poet’s Pad, but it’s also one-10th the price in the iTunes store, and it makes it simple to note down your poem and line ideas, offering rhyming words on the spot.

PortaPoet

Its title might have unfortunate echoes, but this newer iPhone/iPad app from Artisan Engineering promises basic help for those who want to write their own greeting card rhymes and share them via integrated Facebook postings or easy email/text sending.

Instant Poetry

Razeware’s Instant Poetry app is a fridge-magnet poetry kit for your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch — drag and drop the words in your kit to make poems on top of a photo background on your screen.

Shakespeare

Get a little inspiration from The Bard, one of the greatest poets ever to write in the English language. Check out his sonnets for ideas, subjects, and interesting word choice. It's all here on this app, available on iTunes. 

FreeSaurus and Thesaurus Free

FreeSaurus (for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) and Thesaurus Free (for Android) help you find just the right word for your poetry. A thesaurus is an old-school writing tool, but who doesn't need a reference to find the word with just the right nuance for what you are trying to express. Especially poets, where economical writing is part of the deal.

Dictionary.com

Another old-school idea: the dictionary. Just like its cousin the thesaurus, a dictionary for a writer is a lot like what they say about American Express: Don't leave home without it. Both these word references are the most basic of all needs for writers of all kinds, including poets. In the midst of a creative surge, poets need to make sure that a word they want to use really means what they think it means. And there's an app for that—this one, available for both Android and Apple products.

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Snyder, Bob Holman & Margery. "Best Smartphone Apps for Poetry Writing." ThoughtCo, Apr. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/poetry-writing-apps-2725648. Snyder, Bob Holman & Margery. (2023, April 5). Best Smartphone Apps for Poetry Writing. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/poetry-writing-apps-2725648 Snyder, Bob Holman & Margery. "Best Smartphone Apps for Poetry Writing." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/poetry-writing-apps-2725648 (accessed March 29, 2024).