One line, one row, the shared counter
The text is cut into lines and each non-empty line is tokenised with the same word counter the readability checker uses, then every word is counted with the same syllable rules. The word and syllable totals across the text are printed at the top, and the same pass drives both the line-by-line table and the headline number, so the two cannot disagree.
An empty line is skipped, not counted - a poem with a blank line between verses still reads as the lines you wrote. A line with no letters at all contributes nothing to the totals, so a poem with extra blank lines neither gains nor loses syllables because of them.
The rules are shared rather than invented for this page: the same tokeniser, the same switches and the same exception list feed the readability checker, so a word counted here is counted the same way there.
The rules, stated and switchable
Three decisions move the count and are switches on the page: whether a silent final -e counts (silent: make = 1), whether a hyphenated compound is counted as its parts (state-of-the-art = 4, or 1 as a whole), and whether a number counts as a word (2026 counts or not). The readability checker has the same three switches, so the two pages cannot disagree about a word.
The page prints the words the rules are unsure about - letter patterns like ea or io, and exceptions like business and people - so a count is never a bare number without its doubts printed beside it. That is the honest counterpart to a dictionary, which this page does not pretend to be.
Switch any of the three rules and the counts rebuild on the spot: the line table and the totals both move, so you can see exactly which words changed and what that does to the total instead of trusting a single opaque number.
The haiku test, judged on English syllables
After the count, the page asks one question: are there exactly three lines counting 5, 7 and 5 English syllables? The verdict is a single sentence - haiku or not - with the line counts printed either way, so the judgment is visible and checkable rather than merely asserted.
The test is deliberately strict about English syllables. The classic Japanese rule counts onji, sound units that do not line up with English syllables, so a strict English haiku usually has fewer than 5-7-5; this page judges English syllables alone, never claims an onji count, and says why. Anything other than exactly three lines fails outright, and the line counts printed beside the verdict show where the 5-7-5 shape breaks down.
Private by construction
The text field is noUrl, so pasted prose never enters the address bar, the share link, the copied summary or the print stamp, and the site makes no network requests at all. The count happens in the same tab the text was typed in, with nothing uploaded.
The two downloads (.txt report and line-by-line .csv) are written locally the moment you click them and carry the exact run on screen, so you can keep a record that matches what you saw and leave no re-readable copy behind after you close the tab.
Other forms that live or die by the line count
A haiku is the form this page was built to judge, and it is not the only one that lives or dies by a line count. A tanka is 5-7-5-7-7, a limerick runs 8-8-5-5-8 in most readings, and a song lyric is written to a melody whose stress pattern is what actually has to fit. None of those is a switch here; the line table is, because it gives the count per line and the words that made it, so the arithmetic for any other form is a row you read rather than a total you guess at.
That is the practical reason this page counts by line instead of printing one number. A total of seventeen syllables can be four lines or two; the form cares about the distribution, and a distribution is exactly what a table of lines with a count each shows. The .csv download carries the same rows, so a workshop can paste the counts into a shared document without retyping them, and two drafts can be compared line by line instead of by total.
One warning belongs to this kind of counting: the rules are English rules. A name, a loanword or a compound that came in from another language is counted by the letters it has rather than by how it is said, and the page lists the words it is least sure about after the table. Treat a verdict as a reading of these rules rather than as a ruling on the poem.
Danfio