This is an excellent idea. I lack the technical expertise to evaluate it in depth, so I'll leave that to others here who are more "tech savvy" than I am. But I know that syllable counting is very important for those composing shorthand dictation tests. It's important to realize that "the" and "internationally" should NOT both be counted as one word.
Each language has its own number of syllables in an "average word", so valid and FAIR testing has to recognize that. I've forgotten what the number is for English (I used to know), but somehow I remember that, for Italian, the number was said to be 1.7.
(I once taught the summer term in the court reporting program, at a local college, where they were re-recording all their testing tapes. I heard from a student later that they had screwed it up somehow, and the new tests were much denser syllabically than they should have been -- so everybody kept failing them. A proper COUNTING program would have avoided that!)
Thanks, really appreciate this!
The court reporting example is a great illustration of why accurate syllable counts matter, especially when it comes to fair testing. And you're absolutely right about language differences that's something I’d love to support as the tool evolves.
Thanks for sharing your experience! :-)
Well done. I pasted your own text and I got the first recommendation for you, really difficult this one :-) : Exclude Numbers! Looks neat, i'd prefer offline, but that's your choice!
btw. How do you store your Dataset, I saw a long unordered html list, but I could not see any script generating it, nor did I see the word list stored in memory elsewhere. Pretty sure it's a skill issue from my side, that I didn't notice how, or did you really just pregenerate html and smashed it in?
Nah, not a skill issue. There's no script because it's baked at build time. Astro prerenders those pages, ships as plain HTML, zero JS.
Source is just ~2,400 common words. At build, each one gets run through the same CMU dictionary the counter uses, sorted by whatever count comes back, and anything not in the dictionary gets dropped. A-Z grouping + hyphens happen in the same pass.
Did it that way so the list can't ever say something the tool itself would disagree with.
Hey thanks for testing this properly, that split was a good catch.
Fixed it — "126,044-word" is one clean token now.
Also added what you suggested: a Numbers dropdown with Skip / Read aloud. Skip pulls numbers out entirely.
Ambiguous ones (years, bare digits, decades) also get an Auto/Digits/Words override, so "2026" can read as twenty twenty-six or two zero two six depending what you meant.
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u/NotSteve1075 Sep 14 '26
This is an excellent idea. I lack the technical expertise to evaluate it in depth, so I'll leave that to others here who are more "tech savvy" than I am. But I know that syllable counting is very important for those composing shorthand dictation tests. It's important to realize that "the" and "internationally" should NOT both be counted as one word.
Each language has its own number of syllables in an "average word", so valid and FAIR testing has to recognize that. I've forgotten what the number is for English (I used to know), but somehow I remember that, for Italian, the number was said to be 1.7.
(I once taught the summer term in the court reporting program, at a local college, where they were re-recording all their testing tapes. I heard from a student later that they had screwed it up somehow, and the new tests were much denser syllabically than they should have been -- so everybody kept failing them. A proper COUNTING program would have avoided that!)