Skip to content
home Transcription guide

Put what you hear
into words.

A hard-to-hear word. A second singer. A chorus that comes back around. Find your way through the little decisions that go into writing lyrics for Genius.

Start with the bit you’re stuck on

Where does the advice come from?

Each entry names its source and authority tier. A linked linter check may cover only part of a convention; read its example and the entry’s qualifications for the limits.

The ascending bars ahead of each entry's tier label are its standing drawn as a ladder: four steps for the four source tiers, filled up to the tier the entry's sources establish. Climbing it is evidence, never an edit: an entry rises only when a higher-tier source confirming it joins its citations.

LyricLint advisory
LyricLint's own preference, on a convention no Genius source states: the blank line between song parts, the text-hygiene checks. It shares the bottom step with community guidance, because our preference claims no more standing than unreviewed community writing.
Genius community guidance
Ordinary community voice in any venue: an unreviewed annotation, guide-page text with no staff badge, an ordinary forum post.
External reference
An authority outside Genius: a dictionary, a language academy, a platform's own documentation. It ranks below a reviewed annotation because it is authoritative about language, not about Genius.
Editor-reviewed Genius annotation
A reviewed Genius annotation with no staff among its contributors.
Genius staff guidance
Genius staff wrote or touched it: a staff-badged guide page, staff among an annotation's contributors, or a staff reply on the forum. Who wrote it decides the tier, never the venue it appears in.
What about spelling and grammar?

The workbench also uses Harper for English spelling, grammar, and style suggestions. Those suggestions come from the proofreader, so they are not listed here as Genius conventions. Read them in the context of the lyrics before applying a change.

58 results

A common English misspelling

Suggestion spelling.english-common Previewed fix

The standard spelling is “definitely.”

Convention: Spelling follows the language's standard.

What this check detects

High-frequency English misspellings and the correct word. English 'scribes only.

  • definately becomes definitely

  • tommorrow becomes tomorrow

  • seperate becomes separate

  • acheive becomes achieve

  • becouse becomes because

  • freind becomes friend

  • untill becomes until

  • recieve becomes receive

Example

Flagged by this rule
[Verse]
I will definately stay

In the workbench this reads: “definately” is a common English spelling error.

Accepted by this rule
[Verse]
I will definitely stay

The fix

In the workbench this finding carries one control, labelled Replace with definitely. The change is contextual, so it is previewed as a diff in your document first and applies only when you confirm it.

The convention and its limits

This check detects the pattern shown above. An accepted example passes this check; it is not a review of the whole transcription.

Sources

The sources cited by this check:

Commonly Misspelled Words (opens in a new tab) verified Frequent English misspellings including definitely and tomorrow
More Commonly Misspelled Words (opens in a new tab) verified Frequent English misspellings including separate and achieve
Spelling: Top 50 spelling mistakes in English (opens in a new tab) verified High-frequency learner misspellings including definately, freind, untill and recieve
Check a transcription in the workbench
Spotted a mistake, or a convention we're missing? Send a suggestion(opens in a new tab)