Count syllables across your text. Sortable per‑word table with highlighting of 3+ and 4+ syllable words.
Built and maintained by Paul Clark, Redmoon Software
Use the syllable counter to debug other readability scores (especially Flesch and Gunning Fog), to write song lyrics or poetry to a metre, or to evaluate text for children where word complexity is critical.
For exact syllable counts of single words, a dictionary is more reliable. Our counter is optimised for bulk analysis of running text where ~95% accuracy is more useful than per-word perfection.
This tool uses a vowel-group heuristic with handling for silent endings, the "-le" rule, and common irregular words.
Accuracy is around 95% for typical English text. Highly unusual spellings or non-English words will be approximated.
Sort the per-word table to find polysyllabic outliers in your writing.
We use a vowel-group heuristic with handling for silent endings (e.g., "the", silent "e"), the "-le" suffix, and common irregular words. Accurate to within ~5% for typical English text.
Yes, but with reduced accuracy. The syllable counter falls back to a vowel-cluster heuristic that works across many languages.
Polysyllabic words are a primary driver of reading difficulty in formulas like Flesch and Gunning Fog. Highlighting them shows at a glance which words make a passage harder and where to simplify.
Automated counting relies on spelling patterns and vowel groupings, so it can miss silent vowels, regional pronunciations, or words like 'fire' that some people say as one syllable and others as two. Treat counts as a close estimate rather than an exact dictionary value.
Input
Photosynthesis is the process by which plants make food.
Output
17 syllables across 9 words — average 1.89 syllables/word.
"Photosynthesis" alone is 5 syllables, accounting for nearly a third of the total. Polysyllabic outliers like this are exactly what readability formulas penalise.
Syllables are counted from vowel groups: runs of adjacent vowels count as one nucleus, a silent trailing "e" is discounted, and a set of exceptions patches the cases the rule gets wrong — most visibly the trailing "-le" after a consonant, which makes "table" and "little" two syllables rather than one.
English spelling is not regular enough for any rule set to be exact. The counter is reliable on ordinary vocabulary and unreliable on a predictable minority: proper nouns, loanwords ("jalapeño", "hors d'oeuvre"), initialisms read as letters, and words whose pronunciation varies by dialect. "Fire" and "hour" are one syllable for some speakers and two for others, and no counter can be right for both.
This matters beyond this page, because the same counter feeds Flesch, Flesch–Kincaid, Fog, SMOG and Linsear Write. If a document is full of names, every syllable-based score on this site is biased the same direction, and the character-based measures — Coleman–Liau and ARI — are the ones to trust instead.
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