A line that will not fit a melody is almost always a syllable problem, and it is the hardest one to see while you are writing. Read your own verse out loud and every line feels the same length, because you are the one supplying the tune in your head. Put the counts on the page — eleven, twelve, eleven, sixteen — and the offender jumps out immediately.
This scanner does two things to a lyric you paste. It counts the syllables in every line and flags the ones that do not match the rest of the verse, and it makes a first pass at marking which syllables would carry the stress. The first job is arithmetic and it is reliable. The second is a guess, and this page is honest about that: English stress is not rule-based, so the marks are a starting point you argue with, not a verdict.
It runs entirely in your browser. There is no upload, no account and no queue — the words stay in a textarea, the file is generated on your own machine, and what you get back is a plain .txt or .csv you can open anywhere. I cannot see what you paste.
Paste a lyric to get started.
Nothing scanned yet.
/ is a syllable the tool thinks you would lean on, x one you would not. Amber rows fall outside the target. Treat the stress marks as a first draft — the syllable counts are the part worth trusting.
Your text never leaves the browser. There is no upload anywhere in the code on this page, and no server receives what you paste.
There is no save button, because there is no account. That also means no autosave — export before you close the tab or you will be doing it again.
Getting something useful out of a scan
Six habits that turn a list of numbers into a better verse.
- Scan the verse, not the whole song. Choruses, bridges and verses are allowed to have different shapes; comparing a bridge against a verse just produces noise.
- Fix the outliers before the near misses. A line two syllables outside the others is the one fighting the melody. Three lines that are one syllable off are usually fine — music absorbs that.
- Say the line out loud at the tempo you intend. Counting tells you the line is long; only your mouth tells you whether it is too long. Singing it is the test, the scanner is the shortlist.
- Use the stress marks to find collisions, not to fix them. When a stressed word lands on a weak beat — mountain sung as moun-TAIN — you will hear it the moment you look for it. Move the word, or move the melody.
- Watch the line endings. Two lines that end on the same syllable count but different stress patterns (x / versus / x) will not feel like the same line even when they scan the same.
- Export the CSV when you are working with someone else. A producer or a co-writer can open it in a spreadsheet and see exactly which line you mean without reading your mind.
Why count at all
The case for doing this on purpose rather than by ear.
Prosody is the part of songwriting that lives between the words and the music. Get it right and nobody notices; get it wrong and the line feels wrong in a way most listeners cannot name but every singer feels. The reason it survives drafts is that reading is not singing — on the page a long line is just a long line, and the ordinary silent reading voice cheerfully rushes through four extra syllables without complaint.
The count is the part a machine does well. English syllable counting is a heuristic with a known error rate — silent e, -ed endings, diphthongs, word like fire or rhythm — so expect the odd line to be one out. That matters far less than it sounds, because you are not looking for exact numbers. You are looking for the line that is five syllables longer than its neighbours, and that signal survives every error in the heuristic.
The stress marks are the weaker half, and I would rather say so than dress them up. The rule the tool follows is the real English default — function words recede, content words take the beat, two-syllable words usually land on the first — plus a list of a couple of hundred common exceptions like believe, tonight and remember. Anything outside that list gets the default. If you disagree with a mark, you are probably right; use the pattern to notice, then use your ear to decide.
Common questions
Is my lyric uploaded anywhere?
No. The whole tool runs in your browser. Your text stays in a textarea, the file is built on your own machine when you press Download, and nothing is sent to a server at any point. The site still runs analytics and cookies like any other site — those are described in the privacy policy — but your words are not part of them.
How accurate is the syllable count?
Good enough to find outliers, not good enough to swear by. It handles silent e, most -ed and -es endings, contractions and common diphthongs; it will occasionally be one out on words like fire, rhythm, heaven or anything sung with an elision you did not spell. Since the point is comparison between lines, the rare off-by-one does not change what you should fix.
Can I trust the stress marks?
Treat them as a draft. They come from the standard English defaults plus a dictionary of common exceptions, and real scansion depends on meaning, on the melody and on where you want the emphasis. What the marks are genuinely good for is spotting a stress landing on a weak beat — the kind of thing you fix in one word rather than a rewrite.
Why does it skip my [Chorus] markers?
Because they are not sung. A line that is only a bracketed section label is dropped from the scan so it does not show up as a two-syllable outlier. Anything else on the line, including a real lyric, is counted as normal.
What should I set the target to?
Leave it at 0 the first time. The tool takes the middle line of what you pasted — the median, which survives one silly long line better than an average does — and compares every line against that, which is what you want when you are checking a draft against itself. Set a number when you already have a melody with a fixed slot and need every line to fit it.
Does it work for rap and spoken word?
Yes for counting, less well for stress. Dense verse is where syllable counts matter most, and the counts are the reliable half here. For flow — syllables per bar, where the gaps fall — the Rap Flow Density Calculator is the better tool.
Back to writing
If you landed here before you had words to work on, these are the generators people start with.
- Emotion, Love & Faith29
- Everyday Life & Places21
- World, Latin & Afro19
- Holidays & Seasons17
- Story, Fantasy & Worlds16
- Hip-Hop & Rap15
- Occasions & Milestones15
Or go back to the full list of tools, the generators I use most, or the most recent batch.