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Paste text to see how many syllables its words and lines have. Check haiku and other line patterns, and fix any word you count differently.
Last updated: November 7, 2026
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Type or paste some text to see its reading level.
A syllable counter counts the beats of sound in the words of a text. Paste a word, a poem or song lyrics and it shows the syllables per word, per line and in total. It works from spelling rules and a list of exceptions, so it is an estimate: accents and rare words can change a count.
A syllable is a basic unit of speech sound, and most syllables have a vowel sound at the center. That is why the counter looks for vowel sounds in the spelling. To keep a poem you are drafting, paste it into the online notepad. To see what changed between two drafts, paste them into Text Compare.
| Word | Syllables | Breaks |
|---|---|---|
| cat | 1 | cat |
| water | 2 | wa-ter |
| syllable | 3 | syl-la-ble |
| beautiful | 3 | beau-ti-ful |
| strawberry | 3 | straw-ber-ry |
| unbelievable | 5 | un-be-liev-a-ble |
| poem | 2 | po-em |
| fire | 2 (or 1) | fi-re |
Four steps, and the counts update as you type.
Enter a word or a whole poem. Put each line of a poem on its own line, and leave a blank line between stanzas.
Words show their counts, with dots marking roughly where the syllables fall. Lines show their totals, and the big number above the result is the whole text.
Choose Haiku (5-7-5), Tanka (5-7-5-7-7) or type your own, such as 8,6,8,6. Lines that miss are marked with how far off they are.
Words with a dotted underline vary by accent or are a guess. Click one and use plus or minus to set your own count, and every copy of that word updates.
These are the rules behind the counts. Words the rules get wrong are fixed by a built-in list of exceptions.
| Pattern | What the counter does | Examples and counts |
|---|---|---|
| Silent final e | Dropped, so the e adds no syllable | make 1, time 1, whale 1 |
| -le after a consonant | Kept, because the le is a syllable of its own | table 2, little 2, people 2 |
| -ed endings | Silent unless the ed follows a t or a d | walked 1, wanted 2, needed 2 |
| -es endings | Sounded after s, x, z, c, g, ch and sh | makes 1, boxes 2, places 2 |
| -tion, -sion, -cial | One syllable, however many letters | nation 2, vision 2, special 2 |
| Vowel pairs said together | One syllable | boat 1, rain 1, beautiful 3 |
| Vowel pairs said apart | Two syllables | idea 3, poem 2, create 2 |
| -ism | The final m gets a syllable of its own | prism 2, capitalism 5 |
| Numbers | Read aloud as words | 7 2, 12 1, 2024 5 |
| Contractions | Counted as spoken | don’t 1, isn’t 2, I’m 1 |
Each has a place. Pick the one that fits the job.
| Feature | Clap and count | Look it up in a dictionary | This counter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | A line or two you will say aloud | Settling one hard word | A whole poem, lyric or article |
| Speed | Slow for a long text | One word at a time | A whole text at once, as you type |
| New and rare words | You decide by ear | Missing if the word is not listed | Estimated from spelling, with some uncertain words underlined |
| Your accent | Counts the way you say it | Usually shows one or two standard pronunciations | Standard rules, and you can click any word to set your own count |
| Line targets | You keep a tally by hand | Not offered | Haiku, tanka or your own pattern, with misses marked |
Write 5-7-5 or 5-7-5-7-7 and see at once which lines run over or fall short. A blank line starts the next poem.
Count the syllables on each line to see whether a new line fits the rhythm of the one before it.
Use a custom pattern such as 8,6,8,6 to check the lines of each stanza against the lengths you chose, with a blank line between stanzas. Once a poem is finished, set its title with the title case converter.
See how many beats a word has before you practice saying it, and compare your own count with the counter on the underlined words.
The Flesch Reading Ease score and the Flesch-Kincaid grade come straight from your syllable, word and sentence counts.
Paste a word list and use the per-word counts for clapping games, or ask pupils to fix the dotted words by ear.
Most surprises come down to a few details. If lyrics arrive with odd fonts or stray line breaks, run them through remove text formatting first, and use sentence case to tidy the capitals.
English spelling does not map neatly to sound, and people say some words differently. Words that vary or are guessed get a dotted underline. The dots between syllables show roughly where the beats fall, not where a dictionary would hyphenate the word.
In Japanese the 5-7-5 pattern counts sound units called on, not syllables. In English, 5-7-5 is a convention that many poets follow and many do not.
A final e is usually silent, but -ed is sounded after t or d, so walked has one syllable and wanted has two.
Digits count as the words you would say, so 7 is two syllables and 2024 is five. They are underlined because people read numbers and years differently. Symbols such as $, % and & are skipped, so $5 counts as just five.
Common initials such as FBI, USA and IBM are counted letter by letter. Other capital words, names and unusual words follow the spelling rules, so check them by ear.
Counting happens in your browser and nothing you paste is sent to a server. A long text is counted in a fraction of a second.
The rules are written for English. Words in other alphabets are shown but not counted, and words from other languages that use the Latin alphabet follow English rules, so they are often wrong. To spell a word out letter by letter instead, try the phonetic spelling generator.
On 2,719 common English words kept out of the rule writing, it matched the first pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for 97.1% of words and a pronunciation the dictionary lists for 97.6%. The test used a list of the 10,000 most common English words, so rare words, names and loanwords were not tested and are less reliable. Underlined words are the likeliest to be off, but a word without an underline can be wrong too.
Counting stops after 200,000 characters, and only the first 1,500 words or 250 lines are drawn word by word. Totals, Copy and Download still cover everything that was counted.
The definitions, formulas and poem patterns on this page come from these references, which were opened in November 2026.
Short answers to what people ask most.
Type or paste the word into the box and its count appears at once, with breaks between the syllables. To count by hand, say the word slowly and count the beats, or count the separate vowel sounds.
It looks for vowel sounds in the spelling, then applies rules for silent e, endings such as -ed and -es, and vowel pairs. A built-in list of exceptions fixes words the rules get wrong, and everything runs in your browser.
On 2,719 common English words kept out of the rule writing, it matched the first pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary for 97.1% of words and a pronunciation the dictionary lists for 97.6%. Rare words, names and loanwords were not tested and are less reliable. Underlined words are the likeliest to be off, but a word without an underline can be wrong too.
Their count depends on accent, or the rules are less sure, as with fire, hour or family. Click the word and use the plus and minus buttons to set the count you want, and every copy of that word updates.
Choose Haiku 5-7-5, then type each line of the poem on its own line. Lines that miss are marked with how many syllables over or under they are, and a blank line starts the next haiku.
In Japanese the 5-7-5 pattern counts sound units called on, not syllables, and about 12 English syllables approximate 17 on. Many English poets still use 5-7-5 as a convention, while others write shorter poems.
A tanka is a Japanese poem with five units in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern. Choose Tanka to check one, or pick Custom and type any pattern of your own, such as 8,6,8,6.
Numbers are read aloud, so 7 counts as two syllables and 2024 as five, as in twenty twenty-four. Common initials such as FBI are counted letter by letter, and both are underlined because people read them differently. Symbols such as $ and % are skipped.
Flesch Reading Ease is 206.835 minus 1.015 times words per sentence minus 84.6 times syllables per word. The Flesch-Kincaid grade is 0.39 times words per sentence plus 11.8 times syllables per word minus 15.59. Sentences end at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, but not after abbreviations such as Dr., and a poem without punctuation counts as one long sentence that scores as harder to read.
English spelling does not map neatly to sound, accents differ, and some words are said with more than one number of syllables. Check the underlined words by ear first.
No. Counting runs in your browser, nothing you type is sent to a server, and your text is not saved. Only your Words view setting and custom line pattern are remembered on your own device.