N+7
Quick answer: N+7 is an Oulipo technique that replaces each noun in a text with the seventh noun after it in a dictionary. Learn how the game works and what it teaches.
N+7 is a writing procedure in which every noun in an existing text is replaced by the seventh noun that follows it in a chosen dictionary. Take a sentence, find each noun's dictionary entry, count forward seven noun headwords, and substitute. The grammar survives intact while the meaning mutates, producing texts that are simultaneously orderly and unhinged, like official documents from a parallel world.
The procedure comes from the Oulipo, the Paris-based Workshop of Potential Literature founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais, whose members treat mathematical constraint as a creativity engine. The poet Jean Lescure devised N+7, called S+7 in French for substantif, and it became the group's most portable invention: anyone with a text and a dictionary can run it in ten minutes, and the results teach real lessons about how sentences make sense.
How It Works
Start small. Take the invented sentence 'The cat sat on the mat by the door.' Look up cat, count seven nouns forward, and you might land on catalyst; mat might become matron, door become dormitory. The result, 'The catalyst sat on the matron by the dormitory', is grammatically pristine nonsense with a strange narrative pull. Notice that the output depends entirely on your dictionary: a pocket edition takes bigger leaps than an unabridged one, so the same source text yields different poems from different books.
Variants abound. N+3 or N+15 change the distance; V+7 swaps verbs instead; running the procedure on famous public domain poems is a classic exercise, since readers can hear the original ghosting underneath.
Why Bother?
N+7 looks like a joke and works like a lab. It demonstrates, faster than any lecture, how much of a sentence's authority lives in its syntax rather than its sense, and how arbitrary the bond between a noun and its context really is. For working poets the payoff is diction: after an N+7 session, your ear is recalibrated to notice when an expected noun is deadening a line and a stranger noun would wake it. Some Oulipo-adjacent poets publish polished N+7 texts, but most use the drill the way musicians use scales.
How to Use It in Your Own Practice
Run the procedure on a draft of yours that feels competent but dull. You will not keep the whole output, but two or three accidental substitutions usually point at exactly the nouns your poem chose lazily. Keep the accidents that improve the poem, restore the rest, and note what the exercise revealed about your default vocabulary. Constraint work of this kind also scores surprisingly well on originality when contests reward creative language, provided the finished poem stands on feeling as well as trick.
What poets can take from this
- Fix your dictionary before starting and follow it honestly; the discipline is the point.
- Skip proper nouns or keep them, but decide the rule in advance and apply it consistently.
- Try several offsets, since N+3 and N+12 give different flavours from the same text.
- Run N+7 on your own drafts to expose lazily chosen nouns.
- Treat the output as diagnosis and raw material; publishable N+7 poems are rare and need curating.
Try it yourself
Apply N+7 to a short public domain poem using whatever dictionary you own, then write your own original poem in which one deliberately wrong noun appears in every stanza, chosen because it is stranger and truer than the expected word.
Questions
What does the N in N+7 stand for?
Noun. The French original is S+7, for substantif. The 7 is the number of noun headwords you count forward in the dictionary from each noun in your source text.
Is N+7 a form of plagiarism?
The syntax of the source survives, so attribution is good manners and often part of the fun, as in a title like 'Ozymandias, N+7'. Use public domain sources for published versions and the question disappears entirely.
What is Oulipo?
The Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, founded in Paris in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais. Its members, including Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, invent formal constraints, like N+7 and the lipogram, as engines for new writing.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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