Hyphenation for 'syllable'

Showing how to split the syllables of 'syllable'.

Syllabification or syllabication is the separation of a word into syllables, whether spoken or written. The written separation is usually marked by a hyphen when using English orthography (e.g., syl-la-ble) and with a period when transcribing in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For presentation purposes, typographers may use an interpunct, or a special-purpose "hyphenation point".

At the end of a line, a word is separated in writing into parts conventionally called "syllables" if it does not fit and if moving it to the next line would make the first line much shorter than the others. This can be a particular problem with very long words. Word processing has automated the process of justification, making syllabification of shorter words often superfluous.

A syllable is a basic unit of organization within a sequence of speech sounds, such as within a word. In phonology and studies of languages, syllables are often considered the "building blocks" of words. A syllable usually consists of a nucleus (most often a vowel), which may be preceded by an onset and followed by a coda (collectively margins, which are most often consonants). Syllables may bear properties such as stress and tone and be subject to operations such as reduplication. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite. Most languages of the world use relatively simple syllable structures that often alternate between vowels and consonants. Despite being present in virtually all human languages, syllables still have no precise definition that is valid for all known languages. A common criterion for finding syllable boundaries is native-speaker intuition, but individuals sometimes disagree on them. The earliest attested instances of syllabic writing are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur, which predate the earliest instances of alphabetic writing by several centuries. The shift from pictographic writing to syllabic writing has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing". A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic; also bisyllable and bisyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer to any word of more than one syllable.

Description above from the Wikipedia article "syllable", licenced under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

English
- German (Deutsch)

Want to check spelling, too? Use spellcheck24.net for free!