Sanskrit verse is not counted in stresses, the way English verse is, and not quite in syllables either. It is counted in weight — light or heavy, लघु or गुरु — and once you can call that by eye, a whole line resolves into a pattern you can name. Nothing below needs music or an ear for metre. It is a mechanical skill, three rules deep.
A verse recited with the wrong weights is not merely inelegant — in ritual and recitation contexts it is a real error, the way singing the wrong notes is. And weight is not just about performance: it is one of the few checks a reader has on a transmitted text.
If a manuscript reading makes a metre come out one syllable short, that is not a minor slip — it usually means a word was mis-copied, and the metre tells you where to look. Editors of Sanskrit texts have used this for centuries: the verse form is evidence, independent of what the words appear to say. This page builds that skill from the ground up — how to call a single syllable light or heavy, then how the light and heavy syllables of a whole line identify which of the classical metres it is in — and ends with a scanner you can test on real text, including on itself.
A syllable — strictly an अक्षर, one vowel with whatever consonants cling to it — is गुरु (heavy, counted as two morae) under exactly three conditions, and लघु (light, one mora) otherwise. Check them in this order.
आ ई ऊ ॠ ॡ are the long partners of अ इ उ ऋ ऌ, and ए ऐ ओ औ — the four grammar calls the diphthongs — are treated as long unconditionally; Sanskrit prosody does not recognise a "short ए". Any syllable built on one of these nine vowels is गुरु no matter what follows it.
A short vowel is still गुरु if two or more consonants stand between it and the next vowel — a संयोगः. One consonant is not enough: a single consonant is read as the onset of the following syllable and leaves the vowel before it untouched. This is the rule that surprises people, because it means the weight of a syllable can depend on the word standing next to it, not just its own spelling — and it works straight across a word boundary, exactly as it works inside one word.
A short vowel carrying ं or ः is गुरु, because both close the syllable exactly as a consonant would — they are, in origin, exactly that: a nasal or a sibilant reduced to a mark.
Not a made-up sentence — the opening pāda of an actual Pañcatantra verse, scanned mechanically below. Hover a syllable, or read the title text, for the reason.
Visarga behaves exactly like a consonant cluster — it closes the syllable it sits on — and a real संयोग a few syllables later does the same to a short vowel with nothing else unusual about it:
And anusvāra, in a word that also carries a conjunct — two different rules, one syllable each, in "नित्यं":
Once a line is scanned into a string of लघु and गुरु, nobody reads it three syllables at a time in isolation — Sanskrit prosody names eight possible three-syllable patterns and calls each a गण, and every fixed metre below is stated as a short sequence of these, not as thirty-odd individual syllables.
The traditional mnemonic for the eight is one word: — and its own construction is the best-kept secret in the subject. Scan the mnemonic itself, and its ten syllables, taken three at a time, spell out all eight gaṇas in order — the word teaches itself.
Read the table below the same way: syllables 1–3 give य, syllables 2–4 give म, syllables 3–5 give त, sliding one syllable at a time through all eight — and the last two syllables, ल and गं, are not a gaṇa at all but the two single weights every formula below also needs on their own.
| गणः | अक्षराणि | पैटर्न | स्मरणम् |
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Every metre below belongs to one of two families, and they are counted by completely different units.
Every pāda has a fixed number of syllables, and — in a समवृत्त like शार्दूलविक्रीडित or स्रग्धरा — every one of those positions has a fixed weight, stated as a run of gaṇas. Get one syllable wrong and the line no longer scans as that metre at all. Almost everything on this page, including अनुष्टुभ् in its own looser way, is वर्णवृत्त.
The syllable count is free; what is fixed is the total मात्रा — light=1, heavy=2 — in each half of the verse. Two short syllables and one long one are interchangeable, because both total two morae. The one मात्राछन्द worth knowing well is आर्या: enormously common in didactic and gnomic verse (72 of the 1,071 scannable Pañcatantra verses below are आर्या — the second most frequent metre in the whole text, after अनुष्टुभ् itself), and built on a single, checkable fact: its first half totals 30 morae, its second half 27.
Thirteen metres, each with its formula, its yati (the compulsory pause inside a pāda — always at a word-break, never mid-word), how often it actually occurs in the Pañcatantra, and one real verse.
By far the commonest metre in classical Sanskrit — 846 of the 1,071 labelled verses below, four out of every five — and the one every other book on this site quotes without comment, so it earns its own explanation. Four pādas of eight syllables is necessary but nowhere near sufficient: positions 1–4 and 8 are close to free (the small set of exceptions are called विपुला and are not covered here). What is actually fixed, in the standard पथ्या form, is just three positions per pāda:
त्रिष्टुभ् is not itself one pattern; it is the name for the class of metres with an eleven-syllable pāda. Two of its members are true समवृत्त — every pāda identical — and differ from each other in exactly one syllable, the very first:
Every metre below is a समवृत्त: state the gaṇa sequence for one pāda and all four are identical.
Three verses share one skeleton and differ only in how the mora budget is split between the two halves of the verse:
| छन्दः | प्रति-पाद | सूत्रम् | यतिः | पञ्चतन्त्रे |
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Paste any Devanāgarī verse, or pick one below. Every syllable lights लघु or गुरु by the three rules above, the gaṇas assemble underneath in triples, and the metre is named — or honestly reported as unmatched, with the closest candidate and exactly where it stops matching.
Running now, in your browser, over every one of the labelled verses above — the same code that just scanned your verse.
| छन्दः | पञ्चतन्त्रे | स्कैनर सहमत | % |
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Six questions on scanning by eye and naming what you scanned.