Haiku, with every syllable counted
Give it a subject and get poems that scan: the syllables are counted in your browser, line by line, free.
How the syllables are counted, and where counting 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. The counter runs entirely in your browser, with no model and no charge, and three things happen to every word, in order.
- Your own corrections win. Click any word in the check 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.
- A built-in word list of 1,208 entries, chosen as the words the rules get wrong plus the common core of English, so ordinary vocabulary never depends on a guess.
- 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. 108 English words simply count either way — fire, flower, hour, every, heaven. Those are never given a single number here: the line is reported 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.
What comes back with each poem, and what is checked against it
Every poem arrives with the model's own claimed syllable count for each line. That claim is not trusted. The browser counter recounts every line and reports the reconciliation beside the poem, so any disagreement between what the model said it wrote and what it actually wrote is on screen rather than absorbed. A set where the model miscounted is still shown to you — with the miscount named.
Strict 5-7-5 and modern English short-long-short are both available, and so is alternating between them, because the modern form legitimately does not add to seventeen and pretending otherwise is how most haiku tools quietly fail.
Each poem also names its season word and the position of the cut — which line the turn falls after. Craft notes say what each poem is doing. Lines the model wrote and then rejected are listed too, each with the reason it was set aside, so you can see what it considered and not only what it kept.
Fixing a draft, saved sets, and getting the poems out
Fix-my-draft mode: paste a haiku that does not scan and the revisions come back keeping your images, with what was changed stated line by line rather than silently replaced. Paste three lines and the app offers the switch itself.
History of past sets is saved to your SkillSafe account and mirrored in this browser, and it is searchable by meaning rather than by exact words, so "the one about rain on the fire escape" finds it.
Export as Markdown, plain text, a line-by-line CSV or JSON, and print. The syllable check exports on its own too, without a run.
Runs are metered and need an account. The syllable checker is free and always will be — it needs no model and no sign-in.