phpMan > perldoc > Lingua::EN::Syllable

NAME
    Lingua::EN::Syllable - count the number of syllables in English words

SYNOPSIS
      use Lingua::EN::Syllable;

      $count = syllable('supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'); # 14

DESCRIPTION
    Lingua::EN::Syllable::syllable() estimates the number of syllables in the word passed to it.

    Note that it isn't entirely accurate... it fails (by one syllable) for about 10-15% of my
    /usr/dict/words. The only way to get a 100% accurate count is to do a dictionary lookup, so this
    is a small and fast alternative where more-or-less accurate results will suffice, such as
    estimating the reading level of a document.

    I welcome pointers to more accurate algorithms, since this one is pretty quick-and-dirty. This
    was designed for English (well, American at least) words, but sometimes guesses well for other
    languages.

KNOWN LIMITATIONS
    Accuracy for words with non-alpha characters is somewhat undefined. In general, punctuation
    characters, et al, should be trimmed off before handing the word to syllable(), and hyphenated
    compounds should be broken into their separate parts.

    Syllables for all-digit words (eg, "1998"; some call them "numbers") are often counted as the
    number of digits. A cooler solution would be converting "1998" to "nineteen eighty eight" (or
    "one thousand nine hundred eighty eight", or...), but that is left as an exercise for the
    reader.

    Contractions are not well supported.

    Compound words (like "lifeboat"), where the first word ends in a silent 'e' are counted with an
    extra syllable.

SEE ALSO
    Lingua::Phonology - a framework of classes that provide "an object model for lingistic phonology
    and sound change". That includes syllables, and it looks like you can use it to get syllables
    for words, but from a quick skim of the doc I can't see exactly how.

    Text::Info - a new module (as of late 2015) that provides information about text in Germanic
    languages, including syllable count.

REPOSITORY
    <https://github.com/neilb/Lingua-EN-Syllable>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE
    This software is copyright (c) 1999 by Greg Fast <gdf AT imsa.edu>

    This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl
    5 programming language system itself.

AUTHOR
    Greg Fast (gdf AT imsa.edu)