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A syllable counter breaks text into words and counts the spoken beats in each one. This one counts syllables word by word, totals them, and turns the totals into a Flesch Reading Ease score: 206.835 minus 1.015 times the average sentence length minus 84.6 times the average syllables per word. It runs in your browser, so nothing you paste is sent anywhere.
Paste or type something above. Counts appear as you write.
The score printed above the word list is computed exactly as Rudolf Flesch defined it in 1948:
Reading Ease = 206.835
− 1.015 × (total words ÷ total sentences)
− 84.6 × (total syllables ÷ total words)A score of 100 is roughly a sentence of eight one-syllable words. A score of 30 is academic prose. The scale is open at both ends, so a long sentence of long words can score below zero, and this tool prints that number rather than clamping it — a negative score is information, and rounding it to zero would hide it.
The reading level a score maps to is Flesch’s own labelling and is a US school-grade heuristic from the 1940s. Treat it as a way to compare two drafts of the same passage, which it is good at, rather than as a measurement of a reader, which it is not.
The counter finds the vowel groups in a word’s spelling and then applies the corrections English spelling requires: adjacent vowels normally form one nucleus (BOAT is one syllable) but recognised hiatus pairs are split (CU-RI-OUS is three); a silent terminal e is discarded (MAKE is one) unless a consonant + le ending needs it (CAN-DLE is two); a final -ed is silent except after t or d (WALKED is one, WAN-TED is two); a final -es is silent except after a sibilant (MAKES is one, WISH-ES is two).
This is the same function that generated the stored syllable division for entries in the dictionary that the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary does not cover. For the 35,490 entries it does cover, the dictionary uses the transcription instead, because a count derived from real speech beats one derived from spelling every time. If you are checking a single word, open its entry — the syllable line there is the better answer, and it shows you where the stress falls as well.
Look up a single word to see its stored division, its IPA transcription and its respelling.
The counting rules ship with this page and run locally. The stored syllable divisions and transcriptions quoted above come from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary; definitions on entry pages come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The Flesch Reading Ease formula is Rudolf Flesch’s, published in 1948 and in the public domain. Full sources and licences.