How does the tool handle the silent final e?

A trailing unaccented e at the end of a French word, such as in table or porte, is silent in ordinary speech and is not counted. The plural endings es and the verb ending ent are treated the same way. Monosyllables like le and je keep their vowel because removing it would leave none.

What is elision and how is it counted?

Elision drops the vowel of short words like le, de, je, and que before a vowel, written with an apostrophe as l'ami or qu'il. The elided vowel makes no syllable, so the tool counts only the following word. L'ami is therefore two syllables, not three.

Why do eau and oi count as one syllable?

French vowel groups such as eau, oi, ai, ou, eu, and au represent a single vowel sound, so each maximal run of adjacent vowels counts as one syllable nucleus. Beau and roi are each one syllable even though they contain several vowel letters.

Is this a poetry meter counter?

No. This counts syllables as spoken in ordinary modern French, where the final mute e is dropped. Classical French verse sometimes pronounces that final e before a consonant, so a strict alexandrine scan can differ. Use this for reading time and readability, not metrical scansion.

Does it support accented letters and ligatures?

Yes. Accented vowels such as é, è, ê, and à are recognised as vowels, and the ligatures œ and æ are expanded to oe and ae before counting, so words like sœur are handled correctly.

French Syllable Counter

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This tool estimates how many syllables a French passage has when spoken aloud. French syllable counting differs from English because of two big rules: the final mute e is usually silent, and short words elide before vowels. Getting those right is what separates a real counter from a naive vowel tally.

How it works

The text is tokenised into words, keeping apostrophe-attached prefixes joined. For each word the algorithm counts maximal runs of vowel letters; each run is one syllable nucleus, so vowel groups like eau, oi, and ai count once. Then it applies suppression rules:

table   -> tabl(e)      = 2 -> 1 group dropped -> "ta-ble" spoken as one... 
                          (final mute e silent: "tabl") = 1 nucleus kept? 
l'ami   -> elision: drop l' -> "ami" = 2 syllables
beau    -> one vowel group "eau" -> 1 syllable
parlent -> final "ent" silent -> "parl" = 1 syllable

A final unaccented e, the plural es, and the third-person plural verb ending ent are removed as silent, unless the word would be left with no vowel at all (protecting monosyllables such as le, je, and ne).

Tips and example

The default sentence, L'ami de la petite table mange une pomme, demonstrates each rule: elision in l'ami, the silent final e in table, mange, une, and pomme. Use the per-word breakdown to spot any word the heuristic handles unexpectedly. Because this is a spoken-speech count, it pairs naturally with the French reading-time and Flesch-Douma readability tools, which both depend on an accurate syllable estimate.