Syllable Counter
Type or paste text below. Counts come from CMU's Sphinx pronunciation dictionary (~126,000 words) wherever a word is listed; anything not in the dictionary falls back to a documented heuristic, marked separately below.
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Syllables
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Words
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Estimated words
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Look up a single word's syllable count and phonetic breakdown, sourced from CMU's Sphinx pronunciation dictionary.
How this counter works
Most syllable counters online use a pure heuristic (counting vowel groups in the spelling), which gets common exceptions wrong — silent e's, "-le" endings, digraphs like "ea" or "ou". This tool looks up each word in Carnegie Mellon University's Sphinx pronunciation dictionary first, which encodes the actual spoken pronunciation (from real phonetic transcriptions), not just the spelling. Only words missing from that dictionary — proper nouns, made-up words, some rare technical terms — fall back to a heuristic, and those are marked in amber in the per-word breakdown so you know which counts are estimates. See About for the full methodology, including a short list of common words where even dictionary-correct pronunciation is genuinely ambiguous between speakers.