Count the syllables in a single word, with the rules shown step by step, or in a whole passage with every word broken down.
readability
Vowel groups found: 5 (highlighted). y counts as a vowel except at the start of a word.
“readability”
5
syllables
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How our syllable counting works
Syllable counts come from the open-source syllable library (MIT licence, by Titus Wormer), based on the syllable rules in the PHP Text-Statistics project (in turn inspired by the Perl module Lingua::EN::Syllable), plus a list of exceptions. It counts vowel groups, subtracts silent endings, adds splits such as “-ia” and “-io”, and overrides the result for irregular words.
It is an estimate. No rule set matches a pronouncing dictionary on every word, and speakers disagree on some words (“fire”, “every”, “family”). On typical prose, the occasional miscount changes a Flesch score by less than a point. Numbers written as digits are counted as if each digit were read aloud. Every formula page uses this same counter, so scores stay consistent across the site. More on accuracy on Readability formulas explained.
Syllable counter FAQ
How do you count syllables in a word?
Say the word and count the vowel sounds, not the vowel letters: “bread” has two vowels but one sound, so one syllable. Our counter starts from groups of vowels, then applies rules for silent e, -ed and -es endings, and a list of exceptions.
How accurate is this syllable counter?
For common English words it is very accurate, but no rule set is perfect. English spelling has many exceptions, and some words have two accepted pronunciations (“every” as 2 or 3 syllables, “fire” as 1 or 2). Dictionary-based counters disagree on these too.
Why do syllables matter for readability?
Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog and SMOG all use syllables. In Flesch Reading Ease, raising the average by just 0.1 syllables per word costs about 8.5 points.