How do I sort words by syllable count?

This perl script builds a hash with words (read one per line from stdin, and/or from any filenames listed on the command line) as keys, and syllable counts as the values.

Then it prints the hash keys, sorted by the syllable counts.

#! /usr/bin/perl use strict; use Lingua::EN::Syllable; my %words = (); while(<>) { chomp; $words{$_} = syllable($_); }; print join("\n",sort { $words{$a} <=> $words{$b} } keys(%words)), "\n"; 

Output:

cat dog bookshelf something important 

If you want to print the syllable count along with each word, change the last line to something like this:

foreach my $word (sort { $words{$a} <=> $words{$b} } keys(%words)) { printf "%2i: %s\n", $words{$word}, $word; }; 

Output:

 1: cat 1: dog 2: bookshelf 3: something 3: important 

This version highlights the fact that, as the module itself claims, it only estimates the syllable count. "bookshelf" is correctly counted as having only two syllables but "something" should also be two.

I haven't examined the module code closely, but it's probably getting confused by the e after the m. In many (most?) words, that wouldn't be a silent e and would count as an extra syllable.