WordSound counts syllables. Type a word, a sentence, or a whole poem, and the counter shows a number for every line, plus a stress pattern where one is known. There are also nine word lists — two-syllable words, closed-syllable words, and so on — for anyone who wants to browse or search rather than type one word at a time.
Every syllable count here starts with CMUdict, Carnegie Mellon University's pronunciation dictionary. It covers roughly 134,000 English words, each transcribed as a sequence of phonemes with stress marked on every vowel sound.
A syllable count is just the number of stressed vowel phonemes in a word's transcription — one per syllable, by definition. The syllable split you see (like “beau · ti · ful”) is reconstructed by walking that phoneme sequence back onto the original spelling, which is why it's usually exact but occasionally approximate.
Some words genuinely have more than one correct answer. “Fire,” “hour,” and “every” can be said with fewer syllables in casual speech than in their full, careful pronunciation. This site counts the fuller form — the one a dictionary would cite — and says so on a word's own page when that choice is contestable.
Words outside CMUdict are estimated from spelling rules instead of a real transcription, and marked with ≈ wherever they appear. A handful of syllable splits are also hand-corrected, for words where the automatic phoneme-to-spelling mapping produces a wrong or misleading-looking break.
Teachers building phonics lessons, speech-language pathologists who need a quick reference, parents helping with homework, and poets counting beats — that's who this was built for.