Syllable counter with the beats for every word

This page counts fire as one, and so do most dictionaries — but poets have treated it as two for four hundred years. It belongs to a small family of words where a vowel slides into an r or an l and speakers disagree about whether the slide is a second beat: fire, hour, our, choir, prayer, real, cruel. Say them slowly and a second beat appears; say them at speed and it vanishes. If your line scans better with two, count two — the page is a measuring stick, not an umpire.

Because the dictionary pronunciation collapses it: ev-ry, not ev-er-y. English is full of these squeezed middles, where a vowel between two consonants drops out in ordinary speech — family said as fam-ly, camera as cam-ra, chocolate as choc-late, comfortable as comf-ta-ble, business as biz-ness. This page follows what dictionaries print, which means every counts two and family counts three. Where you land depends on how carefully you are speaking, and both readings are correct English.

Only after a t or a d: wanted and needed gain a beat, walked and hoped do not. That single rule handles almost every past tense in English, and this page applies it, which is why walked comes back as one syllable despite having two vowels in it. The exceptions are a handful of adjectives that kept the older pronunciation — naked, wicked, crooked, rugged, learned, blessed, beloved, aged — and all of them are in the exception list rather than left to the rule.

About 97 per cent on ordinary English prose, and worse the further you get from it. The engine here was checked word by word against dictionary syllabification on 1,878 words while it was written; the final batch of 553, scored once with the rules frozen, came out 97.5 per cent right. What remains wrong is predictable: names, loanwords that kept their original pronunciation, invented words, and anything where two pronunciations are both correct. For a haiku, check the three lines by ear as well; for a readability score over ten thousand words, a one-in-forty error rate makes no visible difference.

Often not, and names are the single weakest spot. Chloe and Zoe come back as one beat instead of two, Siobhan as three instead of two, and Irish, Welsh, Vietnamese and Polish names fare worse still, because the rules are built on English spelling habits that those languages never signed up to. Ordinary English words that arrived from elsewhere are handled — café, karaoke, silhouette and two hundred others are held in an exception list precisely because no rule catches them — but a list cannot cover every surname in the world.

Five, seven and five, in that order, for the English form. That is a convention rather than a translation: Japanese haiku count on, sound units that are shorter than English syllables, so a faithful English haiku often runs to about eleven syllables rather than seventeen. Modern English-language haiku editors accept both, and many prefer the shorter shape. The line check on this page reports the difference from 5-7-5 rather than passing or failing you, and the same panel handles tanka at 5-7-5-7-7, a limerick at roughly 8-8-5-5-8 and the ten beats of a sonnet line.

Because a numeral has no fixed spoken form, so guessing would put a wrong number in your total. 1,500 is four syllables as fifteen hundred and five as one thousand five hundred; 2026 is said four different ways depending on the country and the context. Rather than pick one, this page leaves numerals out of the syllable total and says how many it skipped. If the figures matter to your meter, write them out in words and they will be counted like any other word.