Syllable Hub

Syllable counter

Type or paste a word, a line or a few lines. Every word is looked up in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, and you get its syllable count, its stress pattern, any second valid count and a total for each line.

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Up to 5,000 characters. Each line break starts a new line.

Your text is not uploaded. Privacy and dictionary requests.

Words missing from the dictionary are left out of the total until you type a count for them.

How this is calculated

Dictionary lookup

Each word is looked up in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, which lists the sounds of about 126,000 English words as phonemes. The vowel sounds carry a stress digit (1, 2 or 0), so the counter adds up one syllable for every phoneme that has a digit. The stress pattern shown beside a word, such as 1-0 for “water”, is that string of digits.

Alternate counts

Some words have more than one listed pronunciation, and the counts can differ. Fire, hour and every are examples. The table shows the first listed count in the Syllables column and the other valid count in the next column, and a line total that is a range shows the lowest and highest possible totals. Nothing is averaged. The guide to words with two valid counts lists them all.

Words and hyphens

Words are split on spaces, lower-cased and stripped of punctuation at the edges; apostrophes inside a word stay. With the hyphen box ticked, a hyphenated word is one word: the whole word is looked up first, and if it is not in the dictionary its parts are looked up and added up. Untick the box and each part is counted as its own word.

Unknown words

A word that is not in the dictionary is not guessed. It is flagged, left out of the total and counted in the unknown words figure, and you can type your own count into the box beside it to include it. Numbers and abbreviations written with digits are treated the same way. Blank lines are skipped, so the line count is the number of lines that contain words.

Privacy and dictionary requests

Your text is not uploaded. The page downloads small dictionary files named after the first two letters of the words you enter (for example ma.js), so the server can see which two-letter files were requested but never the text itself.

Sources

When to use a syllable counter

Poets and songwriters use it to check a line against a pattern such as the 5-7-5 of a haiku, and the Haiku checker does that check for three lines at once. Teachers and students use it for spelling lists, phonics and reading exercises, where the question is how many beats a word has. People learning English use the stress pattern to hear where the emphasis falls.

It also helps with a close read of a poem: paste a stanza and compare the line totals. If you are counting by hand instead, how to count syllables explains the clap-and-check method, and What Is a Syllable? covers what a syllable is. For lists of words with a set number of beats, see 2 Syllable Words and 3 Syllable Words.

A dictionary count is a count of how a word is usually pronounced. Accents, fast speech and singing can all change it, and a poem may ask for a different reading than the dictionary gives. Treat the number as a well-sourced starting point, not a ruling.

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