Syllable Counter & Verse Detector

Type or paste any text and the page counts syllables per word and per line, totals the document, and reports a Flesch reading-ease score. A separate line-broken panel detects haiku (5-7-5), limerick (9-9-6-6-9 with AABBA rhyme), and sonnet (14 lines of 10 syllables). The per-word breakdown marks words that came from a small curated override map, so you can see where the heuristic and the dictionary disagree. Live, in your browser, no upload, no tracking.

Words 0
Syllables 0
Avg / word 0.0
Flesch —
Overridden 0%

Per-word breakdown

Words in italic came from the curated override map. Everything else uses the vowel-group heuristic.

Type some text above to see the breakdown.

Verse detection

Paste line-broken verse below and the page checks it against three classic shapes.

Haiku 5-7-5 —
Limerick 9-9-6-6-9 / AABBA —
Sonnet 14 lines × 10 syl —

How it works

The count is a vowel-group heuristic: lowercase the word, drop a final silent e (but keep -le endings), then count contiguous runs of vowels a e i o u y. The English language does not have a single rule that gets every word right, so we layer a small override map on top — function words (the, to, a), -le endings (table, apple), compound words (everything, somebody), and a handful of irregulars (business, beautiful). The per-word breakdown marks overridden words in italic so you can audit how much of your text came from the dictionary.

The reading-ease score is the Flesch formula 206.835 − 1.015 × ASL − 84.6 × ASW where ASL is the average sentence length in words and ASW is the average syllables per word. Higher is easier. The verse detectors use off-by-one tolerance per line so a 4-7-5 haiku is flagged as "close" rather than wrong.

Heuristics will always be wrong on a few words. The override map covers common cases but is not exhaustive. For a dictionary-grade count, paste the text into your favourite pronunciation tool and trust that instead.