Syllable Counter & Haiku Checker

Counting syllables sounds simple until you try it. Is “fire” one syllable or two? “Business” two or three? Counting vowels gives the wrong answer for many common words, which is why simple counters often disagree with your ear. This counter looks each word up in a pronunciation dictionary first, so it counts the way people actually speak, and it checks the classic syllable-based poetry forms line by line.

Counting from pronunciations

Words are looked up in the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary, a free list of about 134,000 English words with their pronunciations in American English. Each vowel sound in a pronunciation is one syllable, so “queue” has one, “recipe” three and “business” two, regardless of how many vowel letters they contain. The dictionary is downloaded the first time you open the page and then kept by your browser.

Words the dictionary does not know

Names, brand-new words and misspellings may be missing. For those, the count is estimated from spelling rules that handle silent e, common endings and vowel pairs. Estimated words are marked with a dotted underline and listed below the results, so you know which counts to double-check by ear.

Haiku, tanka and cinquain

Choose a form and the tool compares each line with its pattern: 5-7-5 for haiku, 5-7-5-7-7 for tanka and 2-4-6-8-2 for the cinquain invented by the American poet Adelaide Crapsey. Each line shows its total next to the target, in green when it fits and red when it does not, and the message above tells you whether the whole poem matches. Empty lines between stanzas are ignored.

Reading the line view

Every word shows its syllable count as a small number, with the word split into its likely syllables where the split is clear. The splits are a reading aid, not dictionary hyphenation; the counts are what matter. Hover a word to see whether its count came from the dictionary or was estimated.

Accents and judgement

The dictionary reflects American pronunciation and lists one main pronunciation per word. Some words genuinely vary: “every” is three syllables in careful speech and two in casual speech, “fire” and “hour” can be one or two, and poets may compress or stretch words deliberately. When your pronunciation differs, trust it — the form is about how the poem sounds.

A worked example

Paste the translation of Bashō’s famous poem “An old silent pond / A frog jumps into the pond / Splash! Silence again” with Haiku selected. The lines come out as 5, 7 and 5 syllables, so the notice confirms a haiku. Change “old silent” to “ancient” and the first line drops to 4 and turns red, showing exactly where to add a syllable.

Uses beyond poetry

Songwriters count syllables to fit words to a melody line by line. Speech writers check the rhythm of a slogan. Teachers use the counter to discuss syllables and stress with a class, and readability formulas such as Flesch–Kincaid and SMOG rely on the same syllable counts.

Related tools

Find the rhyme scheme and meter with the Rhyme Scheme Detector, highlight sound patterns with the Alliteration Finder, or count words and characters with the Word Counter.