How many syllables in hour?

Nursery school teachers ask very young children to clap out the syllables in words, so it must be easy to count the number of syllables in a word, right? No, far from it. How many syllables are there in the words hour, fire, bottle, rhythm, William, Italian and layer? Ask your friends; I bet they will give different answers.

Take layer, for instance; if you pronounce it lay-yer (as some English accents do), that's two syllables, the first one has a diphthong and the second syllable has a monophthong. However, for many speakers of English layer is one syllable containing a triphthong, a composite vowel sound made up of three different vowel sounds.

So what exactly is a syllable? Here's the simple definition (from the New Oxford Dictionary of English): "a unit of pronunciation having one vowel sound, with or without surrounding consonants". And here's the technical definition (from SIL, an organisation that documents the world's lesser-known languages) : "a unit of sound composed of a central peak of sonority (usually a vowel), and the consonants that cluster around this central peak".

When counting syllables, we go by the way the word is spoken, rather than the way it is written. So, the m of rhythm would be seen as a syllabic m, and rhythm, therefore, has two syllables. The l of bottle is syllabic too. Hour and fire are generally considered to be monosyllabic words containing a triphthong. The way I pronounce William means it has two syllables, and the way I pronounce Italian makes it a three-syllable word.

Comments

[Yury]

We recently launched a website exactly for this purpose!
It's a syllable dictionary!

http://www.HowManySyllables.com

Amongst other things, you can look up any word and find out how many syllables it has.

[Virtual Linguist]

Interesting ... Which version of English are you using as your base, though? Hour (1 syllable according to your site) and shower (2 syllables ditto) rhyme in many versions of English - that spoken in Northern Ireland, for instance. And Wikipedia says that 'squirrel(l)ed' is one syllable in American English and two in British English. See here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_longest_English_words_with_one_syllable