Abstract A total of 606 co-occurrence networks of Chinese characters and words are constructed from rhymes, free verses, and prose poems. It is found that 98.5 % of networks have scale-free properties, while 19.8 % of networks do not have small-world features, especially the clustering coefficients in 5.6 % of networks are zero. In addition, 61.4 % of networks have significant hierarchical structures, and 98 % of networks are disassortative. For the above observed phenomena, analysis is provided with interpretation from a linguistic perspective.