Free Spanish Accent Checker and Syllable Divider

How the Spanish accent checker works

Paste or type Spanish into the box, up to 20,000 characters. As you type, the checker puts back missing accents, ñ and ü, and it keeps your capitals, so CANCION comes back as CANCIÓN. A word you type with the right accents is kept, and so are vos forms such as mirá and sabés. The tool is also a Spanish accent mark checker for the accents you do type: cancíon, with the accent on the wrong vowel, comes back as canción. The checker doesn't add ¿ or ¡, so you'll need to type those yourself.

The text shows what the checker did. Every word it changed is shaded. A dashed word was decided from the words around it, and a dotted word has two possible spellings and is waiting for you to pick one. A word that isn't in the dictionary gets a wavy underline and stays as you typed it. Copy takes the whole text with its accents in place.

In Spanish, the written accent is called a tilde. In English, the word usually means the mark on ñ. The checker puts back both, so it works as a Spanish tilde checker whichever one you mean.

Words with two spellings, such as tu and tú

Some Spanish words differ only by an accent, and the accent changes the meaning. Tu is "your" and tú is "you." Esta is "this" and está is "is." The checker looks at the words around each one to decide which you mean:

• como estas? becomes cómo estás? (a question typed without ¿ still counts as one)
• Por que no vienes? becomes Por qué no vienes?
• No se que hacer becomes No sé qué hacer
• Para mi es facil becomes Para mí es fácil (but mi casa stays mi casa)
• El me dijo becomes Él me dijo (but el libro stays el libro)
• tu lo sabes becomes tú lo sabes (but tu cancion becomes tu canción)
• Si, claro becomes Sí, claro
• Esta bien becomes Está bien (but esta casa stays esta casa)
• Ella llego tarde becomes Ella llegó tarde (but Yo llego tarde stays as it is)
• un te con limon becomes un té con limón
• Espero que le de el libro becomes Espero que le dé el libro
• Pagamos el envio becomes Pagamos el envío

When nothing around a word settles it, the checker doesn't guess. The word is dotted, and when you tap it you see both spellings, each with what it is: llego "I arrive" and llegó "he arrived." Pick the one you mean. Until you pick, Copy keeps the word as you typed it. If the same word appears several times, you can set all of them at once.

Spanish syllables and the stressed syllable

The checker is also a Spanish syllable divider. Tap any word, and a card shows its syllables with the stressed one in bold, as in can-ción with ción in bold. The card says whether the word is aguda, llana, esdrújula or sobresdrújula, and why it does or doesn't take a written accent, in plain English: "Aguda: stressed on the last syllable, ending in n, so it takes a written accent."

Type a single word and its card shows straight away. That makes it a quick word accent checker: the card finds the stressed syllable and says whether the word needs a written accent. Because the card counts the syllables, it also works as a syllable counter: rá-pi-da-men-te has five.

For a whole text, switch to the "Split into syllables" view. It separates every word into syllables (ca-sa, can-ción) with each stressed syllable in bold, and Copy then copies the divided text.

The divider follows the Spanish rules for syllables. Two vowels side by side usually stay in one syllable, as a diphthong: ciu-dad, cui-da-do. They split when two strong vowels meet (the strong vowels are a, e and o), as in le-er and po-e-ta, or when an accented í or ú stands next to another vowel, as in dí-a, pa-ís, ba-úl and re-ú-ne.

Between two vowels, a single consonant starts the next syllable (ca-sa). Of two consonants, the second starts it (can-to), unless the pair can begin a syllable together, as pr, bl, tr and cl can: com-pra, a-tle-ta. Ch, ll and rr count as one letter (chi-qui-llo, gue-rra), and so do qu and gu before e or i.

Aguda, llana and esdrújula: the accent rules in short

A Spanish word with no written accent follows two rules for its stress (shown here in capitals). If it ends in a vowel, n or s, the stress falls on the next-to-last syllable: CA-sa, JO-ven. If it ends in any other letter, the stress falls on the last: re-LOJ, ha-BLAR. A final y counts as a consonant, as in es-TOY.

The names aguda, llana, esdrújula and sobresdrújula say where the stress falls, and each has its own accent rule:

• An aguda is stressed on the last syllable. It takes a written accent when it ends in a vowel, n or s: can-ción, ca-fé, in-glés.
• A llana is stressed on the next-to-last syllable. It takes one when it doesn't end in a vowel, n or s: ár-bol, lá-piz.
• An esdrújula is stressed on the third syllable from the end, and a sobresdrújula earlier still. Both always take one: mú-si-ca, rá-pi-da-men-te.

A stressed í or ú next to a, e or o always takes an accent, as in dí-a and pa-ís. One-syllable words take none (guion, fue, dio), except where the accent tells two words apart: tú and tu, él and el, mí and mi, sí and si, sé and se, té and te, dé and de, and más and mas.

Question and exclamation words take an accent: qué, cómo, dónde, cuándo, quién, cuál and cuánto. As link words they take none: que, como, donde. The accent stays when the question sits inside a sentence, as in no entienden qué hago, and that's the accent the checker misses most often.

Pronouns attached to a verb add syllables at the end, which can leave the stress on the third or fourth syllable from the end. The verb then needs an accent, and the checker adds it: digamelo becomes dígamelo, damelo becomes dámelo and explicamelo becomes explícamelo.

How well it works

In our test, about 8 in 10 words that had lost their accents came back exactly right. The test used 400 passages of accented Spanish from NexaProva's DELE practice papers, levels B1 to C2, 40,421 words in all. None of the passages were used in building the tool. We took out every accent, ñ and ü and ran the bare text through the checker.

Of the 4,950 words that had lost an accent, ñ or ü, 3,996 came back exactly right. Another 519, about 1 in 10, came back dotted, with both spellings shown for you to pick.

Over the whole text, 449 of the 40,421 words came out wrong, about 1 in 100. Most of them were question words inside a sentence that stayed without their accent, as in no entienden qué hago.

We also ran the same passages with their accents in place. The checker changed 18 of the 40,421 words, mostly vos forms such as fijate, which it gives the tú accent: fíjate.

Read over the question words before you copy. The checker doesn't add ¿ or ¡ either, and a word it doesn't know stays as you typed it, with a wavy underline.

Where the words come from

The dictionary holds 793,142 Spanish spellings from English Wiktionary, through kaikki.org. That's every form of every word, not just the headwords, and each spelling is weighed by how often it's used in film and TV subtitles.

The RAE, the Real Academia Española, dropped some written accents in its 2010 spelling rules, and the checker brings those spellings up to date: sólo becomes solo, guión becomes guion and éste becomes este. The RAE still allows sólo and éste with the accent where a sentence could otherwise be read two ways, so tap the word if yours is one of those and keep the older spelling. Where both spellings are always correct, it leaves yours alone. Video and vídeo, periodo and período, and fútbol and futbol all stay as you typed them.

Other Spanish tools

Accents are one part of written Spanish, and the article in front of a noun is another. The Spanish gender checker tells you whether a noun takes el or la. To practice verb forms, try the Spanish verb conjugation quiz. To write a number out in Spanish words, use the Spanish numbers to words converter.

Frequently asked questions

Licenses and credits

Spanish words and their spellings come from English Wiktionary through kaikki.org (CC BY-SA 4.0). How often each spelling is used comes from FrequencyWords (Hermit Dave, from OpenSubtitles 2018, CC BY-SA 4.0).