Haiku and short forms
Five, seven, five. The total under the results is the number you are checking against, and pasting all three lines at once gives you the whole poem's count in one go.
Words, lines or whole poems
Syllable counter
Paste a word, a line, or the whole thing. You get a count for each word and a total underneath, which is the number you actually want when you are checking a haiku or a line of verse against a metre.
How it works
Counting vowel sounds, then fixing English
The starting point is simple: count the groups of vowels. CAT has one group, WATER has two, BEAUTIFUL has three. That alone gets a surprising amount of English right.
Then come the corrections, and they are what the whole thing hinges on:
- Silent final E. MAKE looks like two vowel groups and is one syllable, so a trailing E after a consonant is discounted.
- The -LE ending. Except that TABLE and CANDLE keep that syllable, so a consonant followed by LE gets it back.
- Y as a vowel. RHYTHM has no A, E, I, O or U and two syllables. Y counts, unless it opens the word, where it is a consonant.
Three rules and a handful of exceptions gets most of English. The rest is genuinely ambiguous.
Where it is honestly unreliable
FIRE, HOUR, POEM and similar words are counted differently by different English speakers, and both answers are defensible. A counter has to pick one, and whichever it picks will look wrong to about half its readers.
If you are writing to a metre, your own ear beats any tool. Use this to check the words you are unsure about, not to overrule the ones you are certain of.
The physical test
Put your hand flat under your chin and say the word normally. Your jaw drops once per syllable. It is the most reliable method there is, it needs no tool, and it settles the ambiguous cases in the way that matters, which is how you personally say the word.
What people use this for
Metre in longer verse
Iambic pentameter wants ten syllables to the line. Counting each line separately shows you which one is running long, which is usually a single word rather than the whole line.
Grading spelling lists
Syllable count is a better difficulty measure than letter count for young readers. Two-syllable words are a different exercise from one-syllable words in a way that four letters against five is not.
Songwriting
Fitting a lyric to an existing melody is a syllable-counting problem before it is anything else, and it is where most rewriting time goes.
Questions
About counting syllables
How accurate is it?
Good on ordinary words and wrong on some of the awkward ones, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise. It counts vowel groups and then applies the corrections that matter most in English: silent final E, the -LE ending that keeps its syllable, and Y behaving as a vowel except at the start of a word.
That handles the vast majority of English correctly. It struggles where pronunciation genuinely varies between speakers, which is a real ambiguity rather than a bug.
Which words does it get wrong?
Three groups, mostly. Words where two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately in some accents and together in others, like FIRE and HOUR. Borrowed words that keep their original pronunciation. And names, which it makes no attempt at.
If a count looks wrong to you, trust your ear. Syllables are a feature of speech, and no rule applied to spelling can capture that perfectly.
Why does it not use a pronunciation dictionary?
Because a good one is large and none of the free ones are small enough to send to your browser alongside everything else. The whole site is built to run on your device with no server, and a pronunciation database would have meant giving that up.
A rule-based counter that is right most of the time and instant seemed a better trade than a perfect one that needed a round trip for every word.
Can I count a whole poem?
Yes. Paste in as many words as you like separated by spaces or line breaks, and you get a count for each plus a running total. That total is the useful number if you are checking a haiku or a line of iambic pentameter.
What counts as a syllable anyway?
One vowel sound, with whatever consonants cluster around it. CAT has one, WATER has two, BEAUTIFUL has three. The reliable test is to say the word slowly and count the beats, or to put your hand under your chin: it drops once per syllable.
Also useful: random words for prompts, and the word checker for definitions and scores.