Syllabication Rules & Tips

A syllable is a single speech part which has only one vowel sound, even tho it may have more than one adjoining vowels.  Multiple vowels may make the vowel sound together.  e.g. dead, true, weak.  There may or may not be combined consonant sounds.  When  you speak a syllable, your mouth opens and closes-- your jaw drops once.  Every time you speak a syllable, your speech has a single beat.  The number of vowel sounds (not vowels, but the sounds!) shows you how many syllables a word has.  As you learn the rules below, you will soon see the pattern of syllabication in other words.

1.   P/R/S:    Divide between prefixes, root words, and suffixes.  e.g.  sing-er, re-do,  walk-ing

2.  VC/CV:  Two consonants between two vowels are split between consonants.  e.g.  per-haps, ac-cept, won-der.

            2a.   If the two consonants form a blend (called a diagraph), do not divide them.  e.g. wish-ing, tough-er,  ring-ing.  These are some diagraphs:   ch, sh, th, wh, ng, nk, ng, ck.

3. V/CV:    One consonant between two vowels is split between vowel  and following consonant, if the vowel is long.   e.g. clo-ver, stu-pid, be-have, di-ver.  See how the consonant goes with the second vowel?

4.  VC/V:  One consonant between two vowels is split after the consonant, if the vowel is accented & short.   e.g. tep-id, drag-on, cam-el, riv-er.   See how the consonant goes with the first vowel?

5.   V/V:   If the vowels have different sounds. split the word between them.  e.g. ra-di-o,

6.   When the last three letters are consonant and le,  split before the consonant, e.g. a-ble, ta-ble, mis-er-a-ble.

7.   Compound words are divided into the original two words.  e.g.  tom-boy, wet-suit, beach-ball.  If either or both of the original words have more than one vowel sound, that word should also be divided into syllables.  e.g. bask/et-ball, book-keep/er, trans-at/lan/tic.

Rules on hyphenation in writing:

1.  Always hyphenate between syllables.  e.g.  read-ing, NOT rea-ding.

2.  Never, never hyphenate a one-syllable word!

 I don't know the reasoning behind these last two rules, but it is better to follow the traditional method until someone comes up with something else.

3.  When you hyphenate a word, the syllable at the end of the line and at the beginning of the following line should have at least three letters.  If you can't manage that, just put the whole word on the following line.

4.  Words of five or less letters should not be hyphenated from line to line, even though they have more than one syllable (see Rule # 3).

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