RhymeZone Shakespeare Search

Welcome to RhymeZone's Shakespeare search engine! The most quoted person in the English language, William Shakespeare wrote over 150,000 lines of poetry and prose. This is a search engine specifically for finding these lines. The goal of this page is to serve Shakespeare enthusiasts and students with a line-oriented search engine that is:

Fast. We give you the lines that contain your query, pronto, on one page.
Integrated. Every search result shows you the line with your query highlighted, and includes a link to the scene or verse containing your query with the line itself highlighted.
Flexible. You can search for arbitrarily long phrases, not just single words. Searching for "All the world's a stage" gives you a pointer to the famous soliloquy. In fact, you can even search for parts of words. Searching for "beauti", for example, will return lines containing beauties, beautiful, or beautify.
Unique. In addition to searching for lines, you can also browse them incrementally. Shakespeare wrote over 150,000 lines, and we've organized them all into a unique "prefix tree" that you can explore, one word at a time. (Click on any word in the bottom section of the front page to get started.) All of the columns in this view are sorted by how frequently they occur in Shakespeare. (For example, "lord," is the most frequent follower in lines beginning with "My".)

How to use this search engine

To do a basic search, simply enter the word, phrase, or letter sequence you're looking for into the box above and hit the "Search" button. By default, you will find only the lines that contain your query exactly as specified (although case doesn't matter).

If you wish to search for multiple words such that order doesn't matter (an "AND" search), type in the words and select the "Keywords" radio button before you submit your query. This option is also useful if you're looking for one keyword that must appear as a whole word within the results.

In both cases, the matching lines are sorted by a measure of how famous they are, so most of the time you will find the most "useful" result right at the top. Click on a result to view the scene or verse that the line appears in, which appears next to the red arrow (

) to the right of each result.

Several special features are available from the links at the top of this page:

For one thing, you can browse Shakespeare's works on RhymeZone by document rather than by line: The comedies, tragedies, histories, and poetry, including the complete set of sonnets, are all available. (You can also find information on a particular play by typing its name into the search engine.)

You can also view a set of words coined by Shakespeare, with links to searches so that you can see in which works they were used.

If you return to the front page, you can try out the "incremental browse" feature by clicking on a word in yellow. This allows you to reveal Shakespeare's lines one word at a time until you've hit upon the line you're looking for.

Finally, and perhaps most interestingly, you can view a regularly-updated list of lines ranked by click popularity. This list shows you which lines your fellow users collectively find interesting; scanning it gives you a remarkably good overview of the nuggets of wisdom contained within Shakespeare.

RhymeZone Shakespeare Search is a work in progress. Please submit feature requests and bug reports through the RhymeZone feedback form. Thanks!