← SkillSafe / Haiku Generator

Haiku that actually scan — with the count shown, line by line

Give it a subject, a mood, or a rough line. Choose strict 5–7–5 or the looser modern English short–long–short, and every poem comes back with the syllables counted for each line.

The counting happens in your browser, free and without an account — so you can paste a haiku you wrote yourself and have it checked, and so every line the model writes is recounted here rather than taken on its word.

Both examples ship with a saved model run, so you can see the whole thing — poems, counts, reconciliation — without signing in and without spending a credit.

nothing typed yet
Drag a .txt in, or It is read in your browser. Nothing uploads until you run.
Treat this as Three lines pasted? Switch to draft mode and the poems keep your images.

Type something to price the run.

How the counting works, and where it stops working

Syllable counting in English is not a solved problem, and this app would rather tell you that than hand you a confident wrong number. Three things happen to every word, in order.

  1. Your own corrections win. Click any word in the check above and set what you say. The correction is saved to your SkillSafe account, so it follows you to another device, and it is applied to every count afterwards — including the check run over the model's output.
  2. A built-in word list. Around twelve hundred entries, chosen as the words the rules get wrong plus the common core of English, so ordinary vocabulary never depends on a guess.
  3. Rules over vowel groups for everything else — silent final e, syllabic -le and -re, the -ed that only sounds after t and d, the -es that only sounds after a sibilant, and the vowel pairs that split (pi-a-no, me-di-um) against the ones that do not (na-tion, mil-lion).

Where it stops working. Some English words simply count either way — fire, flower, hour, every, heaven. Those are never given a single number here: the line is shown as a range with both readings named, because a haiku that scans only if you say fire as one syllable is a real fact about the poem. Beyond that, unusual compounds with a silent e inside them (timeworn) and long vowel runs (hydrangea) are the rules' weakest ground; those words are marked as uncertain rather than counted silently.

Reading the numbers: 5 means five syllables and nothing to argue about. 5–6 means the line contains a word that counts either way, so it is five on one reading and six on the other. A dotted underline under a word means the rules estimated it and could be wrong — click it to fix.