1Lingua::EN::Syllable(3)User Contributed Perl DocumentatioLningua::EN::Syllable(3)
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6 Lingua::EN::Syllable - count the number of syllables in English words
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9 use Lingua::EN::Syllable;
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11 $count = syllable('supercalifragilisticexpialidocious'); # 14
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14 Lingua::EN::Syllable::syllable() estimates the number of syllables in
15 the word passed to it.
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17 Note that it isn't entirely accurate... it fails (by one syllable) for
18 about 10-15% of my /usr/dict/words. The only way to get a 100%
19 accurate count is to do a dictionary lookup, so this is a small and
20 fast alternative where more-or-less accurate results will suffice, such
21 as estimating the reading level of a document.
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23 I welcome pointers to more accurate algorithms, since this one is
24 pretty quick-and-dirty. This was designed for English (well, American
25 at least) words, but sometimes guesses well for other languages.
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28 Accuracy for words with non-alpha characters is somewhat undefined. In
29 general, punctuation characters, et al, should be trimmed off before
30 handing the word to syllable(), and hyphenated compounds should be
31 broken into their separate parts.
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33 Syllables for all-digit words (eg, "1998"; some call them "numbers")
34 are often counted as the number of digits. A cooler solution would be
35 converting "1998" to "nineteen eighty eight" (or "one thousand nine
36 hundred eighty eight", or...), but that is left as an exercise for the
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39 Contractions are not well supported.
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41 Compound words (like "lifeboat"), where the first word ends in a silent
42 'e' are counted with an extra syllable.
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45 Lingua::Phonology - a framework of classes that provide "an object
46 model for lingistic phonology and sound change". That includes
47 syllables, and it looks like you can use it to get syllables for words,
48 but from a quick skim of the doc I can't see exactly how.
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50 Text::Info - a new module (as of late 2015) that provides information
51 about text in Germanic languages, including syllable count.
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54 <https://github.com/neilb/Lingua-EN-Syllable>
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57 This software is copyright (c) 1999 by Greg Fast <gdf@imsa.edu>
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59 This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under
60 the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.
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63 Greg Fast (gdf@imsa.edu)
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67perl v5.32.0 2020-07-28 Lingua::EN::Syllable(3)