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@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@imsa.edu)