Free tool
Syllable counter
Paste any text and get a syllable count for every line and every word. Counts come from a 124,000-word pronunciation dictionary rather than a guessing algorithm. Nothing is uploaded — it all runs in your browser.
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How many syllables should a line have?
For song lyrics, roughly 6 to 12 syllables per line. That is about the length of one natural sung phrase. Much longer and a singer has to rush to fit it in; much shorter and the line can feel abrupt unless it is doing something deliberate.
This matters more than usual if you are generating with Suno or Udio. Both treat each line of lyrics as roughly one musical phrase, so a 15-word line gets compressed, mumbled, or split in an awkward place. Our lyric line checker flags lines outside that range automatically.
How the counting works
Words are looked up in CMUdict, a pronunciation dictionary maintained by Carnegie Mellon. Because it stores how a word is actually said, the count is exact rather than estimated — including the awkward cases like "fire" (2), "orange" (2), and "beautiful" (3).
Words that are not in the dictionary fall back to a vowel-group estimate, and anything estimated is flagged in the results. That mostly affects slang, invented words, and dropped-g spellings like "runnin'". Most tools do this silently; we would rather tell you.
Other free tools
- Lyric line checker — flags lines that will not sing well
- Haiku checker — validates 5-7-5
- Rhyme finder — perfect and slant rhymes