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About this tool
Counts the syllables in a word, a line or a whole passage of English, and reports the per-line counts plus Flesch readability scores.
A syllable counter tells you how many beats a word, a line or a whole passage has. This one applies the rule set of Greg Fast's Lingua::EN::Syllable — count the vowel runs, drop the silent final e except after "-le", ignore a leading y, then apply the published correction patterns for spellings like "-cious", "-ion" and "-ism" — and checks a list of common irregulars first. From those counts it also computes the two formulas that need them: Flesch Reading Ease (Flesch, 1948) and Flesch–Kincaid Grade Level (Kincaid et al., 1975). It is for poets writing to a metre, teachers checking reading level, and copywriters trimming a headline.
Open Syllable Counter on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Paste or type the text you're working with.
Choose how it should be transformed or analyzed.
Copy the finished text into your document or post.
Every line gets its own word and syllable count, which is what verse and lyrics actually need.
Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch–Kincaid Grade are computed from the same counts, with Flesch's own difficulty bands.
The whole count runs locally, so unpublished drafts stay on your machine.
Count the groups of vowel letters, then correct for the silent letters English keeps. "Beautiful" has vowel runs eau-i-u, giving 3, but the -ful ending adds one, so 4. The main corrections are: a final e is usually silent ("make" is 1), except after a consonant plus l ("table" is 2); a leading y is a consonant; and endings like -cious, -tion and -ion collapse two vowel runs into one.
About nine words in ten for ordinary English prose. Rule-based counters have no way to know that "read" and "read" sound different, or that "business" is two syllables rather than three, so a list of known irregulars is checked first. Names, loanwords and technical terms are where it is most likely to be off by one.
60 to 70 is Flesch's "standard" band, roughly 8th to 9th grade, and it is what most general-audience writing aims for. Above 90 is very easy, below 30 is very confusing. The score is 206.835 − 1.015 × (words per sentence) − 84.6 × (syllables per word), so shorter sentences and shorter words both push it up.
Five, seven and five, for seventeen in total. That count is a convention borrowed from the Japanese on, which are not quite the same unit as English syllables — which is why many modern English haiku deliberately run shorter. Paste three lines here and each line's count is shown separately.