Syllable Counter — Syllables per Line for Lyrics

The city lights are shining bright (8)
I walk along the empty street (8)
Every heartbeat sings to me (8)

Hold on, 사랑해 (5)

What it is

A syllable counter built for lyrics and poetry. Songwriters rewriting a verse, poets checking the meter of a stanza and students working on a haiku all need to know how many syllables sit on each line. Paste your text and every line gets its own count in a table, with a running total at the top. Put the original line and your rewrite side by side, and you can tell at a glance whether the new words will fit the melody.

English syllables are estimated by rules rather than looked up, so the tool works offline and instantly on any text, at the cost of occasional mistakes on unusual words. Hangul is counted exactly, which makes the tool handy for bilingual K-pop style lyrics where English and Korean share a line. You can also copy your lyrics back with the count added to the end of each line, ready to paste into your notes.

How to use

1. Paste your lyrics or poem. Each line break starts a new line in the table.
2. Read the per-line table: Hangul syllables, the English estimate and the line total.
3. Check the totals for the whole text above the table.
4. Copy the “Lines with syllable counts” block to keep the numbers alongside your words.

How it works

The English estimate applies these rules to each Latin-script word:

1. Accents are removed and only the letters a to z are kept. Words of three letters or fewer count as 1.
2. Each group of consecutive vowels (a, e, i, o, u, y) counts as one syllable, so beau-ti-ful is 3.
3. A final e after a consonant is silent (make, home), except a consonant followed by -le (table, little).
4. A final -es or -ed after a consonant is silent (makes, jumped), except where it is pronounced: -es after s, x, z, c, g, ch or sh (boxes, pages), -ed after t or d (wanted), and either ending after a consonant plus l (tables, puzzled).
5. The vowel groups ia, io, iu and iou count as two unless they follow c, g, h, s, t or x, so piano and radio get 3 while nation stays 2.
6. -ing straight after a vowel or y adds one (being, playing).
7. Every word counts as at least 1.

Hangul is normalised to NFC and each character from U+AC00 to U+D7A3 is one syllable. Spaces, punctuation, digits, emoji, Chinese characters and other scripts are not counted. Blank lines are left out of the totals. Input is limited to 50,000 characters and 2,000 lines.

Examples

Line	English (est.)	Total
The city lights are shining bright	8	8
I walk along the empty street	8	8
Hold on, 사랑해	2	5

Some words the rules get right and wrong:

Word	Estimate	Actual
banana	3	3
beautiful	3	3
table	2	2
idea	2	3
science	1	2
rhythm	1	2