Syllable Counter
Count syllables in any English text instantly. Paste a poem, an essay, or a single line — you get the total syllables, words, and sentences live, a per-word breakdown for short texts, and a quick lookup box for checking one word at a time. Perfect for haiku, songwriting, and readability work.
Syllables
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Words
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Sentences
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Last word
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Type a word
How syllables are counted
A syllable is one beat of spoken sound built around a vowel sound. The counter works the way a linguist would sketch it on a napkin: lowercase the word, find every group of consecutive vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and y), and count the groups. Then it applies the two corrections that matter most in English — a silent final "e" is dropped ("love" is one syllable, though "ta-ble" keeps its consonant-plus-"le" beat), and a "-ed" past-tense ending is silent unless it follows t or d ("jumped" is one syllable, "wan-ted" is two).
Rules alone are not enough, because English spelling and English pronunciation parted ways centuries ago. "Business" looks like three syllables and is spoken as two. "Wednesday" hides a whole silent syllable. "Colonel" is simply unreasonable. That is why the counter layers a dictionary of dozens of common tricky words on top of the heuristic — the words people actually look up — each set to its generally accepted American English count.
The result is right for roughly 90–95% of running text. The last few percent are words English itself cannot agree on: is "caramel" two syllables or three? Depends on where you grew up. For those, treat the counter as a very good first opinion.
Writing haiku? The 5-7-5 check
The most common reason to count syllables is the haiku: three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Type one line at a time and watch the total, or paste the whole poem — for short texts every word gets its own chip showing its count, so you can see instantly which word pushes a line over. The "last word" stat updates as you type, which makes hunting for a one-syllable or two-syllable replacement word fast.
One honest footnote: traditional Japanese haiku count on — short sound units — not English syllables, and 17 English syllables carry more content than 17 on. Many English-language haiku poets deliberately write shorter than 5-7-5. For a classroom assignment, stick to the classic form; for your own poetry, treat it as a starting point.
More writing tools
Syllables are one lens on your text. The readability checker uses this same syllable engine to compute Flesch Reading Ease and grade-level scores for your writing. The word counter gives you words, sentences, and keyword density, the character counter checks social media and SEO length limits, and the reading time calculator estimates how long your text takes to read or present aloud.