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Questions tagged [syllables]

A unit of pronunciation having one vowel (or vowel-equivalent) sound, with or without surrounding consonants, forming the whole or a part of a word.

syl·la·ble

noun /ˈsiləbəl/  syllables, plural

A unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants, forming the whole or a part of a word; e.g., there are two syllables in water and three in inferno

A character or characters representing a syllable

The least amount of speech or writing; the least mention of something
- I'd never have breathed a syllable if he'd kept quiet

verb /ˈsiləbəl/  syllabled, past participle; syllabled, past tense; syllables, 3rd person singular present; syllabling, present participle

Pronounce (a word or phrase) clearly, syllable by syllable

124 questions
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Is there a list of syllables contained in US English?

I'm trying to find a list of all syllables (ideally just syllables that appear at the start of words in english). Any suggestions?
Clay Nichols
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What's the longest monosyllabic word? And disyllabic?

Another question on the site made me take notice that through is monosyllabic, but quite long. Are there longer monosyllabic words? What's the longest disyllabic word in English? Edit: so, Wikipedia has a page for monosyllabic words, but none for…
F'x
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What are the syllabification rules for English?

I am trying to break a word down into syllables and am not quite sure how to do it for English. Some problems I face: The letter-to-sound rules are not one-to-one. As an example, notice that z"ea"l and "ee"l are different in orthography but map…
Sriram
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3 answers

Syllables and mora

I have recently discovered the linguistic term 'mora' as a subset of a syllable and am thinking through some examples. How would the word 'stretched' be analysed? Is it one syllable? And what are its mora?
toandfro
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4
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3 answers

Half-Syllables in English?

Has any authority recognized what we could call "half-syllables"? I.e., "Air" being pronounced /ay-r or /eh-r; not quite two whole syllables, but more than one. Or "I" pronounced /ah-e {except in the U.S. South, where it's just /ah.}
Terence Kuch
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4
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Same words with different syllabification

I am Italian and I need to split English words into syllables for suprasegmental phonetic analysis. I'm noticing that the Longman Online Dictionary http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/ gives different syllabification according to whether a word is…
Elisa
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What is the term that means to add an extra syllable to a word?

This situation is most noticeable when a singer adds a syllable to a word like "Fuh-ree" instead of "free" or "Buh-rave" instead of "brave". It's not Melisma, which is intentional by the writer.
Ben Plont
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I can't find a single word that starts with the "Sa" sound in "saga"

I've read every word starting with "SA" in my dictionary out loud. It's driving me crazy thinking there is only a single English word starting with what appears to be such a common syllable. Is it my Midwestern American accent? What makes "saga"…
JP Duffy
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Number of syllables in "liar", "prior"

It seems that there are two syllables in "liar" (li·ar) because it is made up of a stem "lie" plus the suffix "ar". But what about "prior" (pri·or)? Does it have something to do with the final "r" as opposed to "fire" which has only one syllable?
Hela
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Is the way of syllafibication certain?

How to syllabify may be certain in many words. But some words have several ways, I think. For example, "extra" can be divided into "ek" + "stra" and "eks" + "tra". Does this mean that people remember a word in several different ways? Or do people…
Motoki
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1 answer

Why is the word "mimic" divided into syllables as mim-ic and not mi-mic

I would like to know why, when dividing the word mimic into its syllables, is it divided as "mim" and "ic" and not "mi" and "mic". Is there any rule to this?
user119020
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Words comprising the 322 most frequent syllables?

There is a list of 322 most common syllables which when used can make up the 5000 most frequent words in the english language. http://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/7539/urlt/manual.pdf (Page 34-36) How do I find naming convention was used for…
nette
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How many syllables BrE and AmE regarding the word 'secretary'?

I am from Germany and I am having a question regarding the pronunciation of AmE and BrE. I have a book and the text there says that there is a two syllable-pronunciation in BrE R.P. of the word secretary [sektrɪ] and in rapid BrE speech whereas in…
tima
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How many syllables does "cry" have?

I started out to make a program which finds out the number of syllables in a word, which is when I realized that I couldn't decide how many syllables cry consists of. According to Wikipedia, A unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or…
Rushil Paul
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Syllables in "trickling"?

Could someone please explain why almost every website says "trickling" has two syllables? Is tri-kel-ing a regional dialect? Is it two syllables when being written?
Sam
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