Syllable Counter

A syllable is one beat of a word, built around a vowel sound. The counter finds those vowel sounds from the spelling: groups of vowels, with rules for vowels said apart (ra·di·o, ac·tu·al, be·ing), a silent e at the end of a word (make, but ta·ble keeps its last beat), and -ed and -es endings that only add a beat after t or d or a hissing sound (want·ed but played, box·es but makes).

English spelling has many exceptions, so the counter also carries a hand-written list of about 270 frequent words the rules get wrong, such as ev·ery, busi·ness, peo·ple and colo·nel. It is still a rule of thumb, not a dictionary: some names and loan words come out one off, and a few words depend on accent. Fire and hour count as one syllable here; some speakers say two.

The split under the counts (syl·la·ble) is a best guess at where the breaks fall. It is close to dictionary hyphenation but not the same; the count is what the tool is for.

Each line of your text is counted on its own, with the count next to it. Compare two verses, check that the lines of a chorus match, or keep a rap verse's flow even before you record it. Blank lines are skipped, so stanzas can stay apart.

Paste a poem of exactly three lines and a badge shows whether it follows the 5-7-5 pattern of a haiku. Many poets treat the pattern as a guide rather than a rule, so a 5-6-5 poem is not wrong, just different.

Switch the language above the text and the counter uses that language's rules. Spanish syllables follow fixed spelling rules: strong vowels (a, e, o) are said apart (le·er), the weak vowels i and u join a neighbour in a diphthong (ciu·dad), and an accent on í or ú breaks the pair (dí·a, pa·ís). Ch, ll and rr count as one consonant (gui·ta·rra), so normal Spanish words come out exact.

German counts follow the vowel groups, with ei, au, eu, äu and ie as one sound (Fei·er, Häu·ser), while -ion and -ia are said in two (Na·ti·on, Ma·te·ri·al). A few loan words such as Familie, where ie is said i-e, are listed by hand. Poetry in Spanish often joins vowels across two words when counting metre (sinalefa); this counter counts each word on its own.

Syllables per word is one of the two inputs of the best-known readability formulas: Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid both move with it. A sales email, a voicemail script or a training note with fewer long words is easier to follow, above all when it is read on a phone or said out loud.