Syllabified

Syllabified is the past participle and adjective formed from the verb syllabify, meaning divided into syllables. It describes words, transcriptions, or texts that have been segmented to show their syllable boundaries. The term is used in linguistics, education, publishing, and computational text processing.

In linguistic analysis, syllabified forms help illustrate syllable structure—onset, nucleus, and coda—and support study of stress, rhythm, and phonotactics. Phonological syllabification may differ from orthographic division; spoken syllable boundaries are guided by sound patterns and principles such as the sonority sequencing principle and maximal onset, while written hyphenation follows orthographic and typographic rules.

Educational materials often present syllabified words to teach reading, pronunciation, and spelling by making syllable divisions explicit. In publishing, syllabification informs hyphenation for line breaks and justification. In speech technology, text-to-speech systems and automatic speech recognition use syllabified inputs to improve prosody modeling and segmentation.

Methods for producing syllabified text include hand annotation, rule-based algorithms that encode phonotactic constraints, and machine learning models trained on annotated corpora. Challenges arise from language-specific syllable constraints, morphological boundaries, and dialectal variation, so automated syllabification may require language- or domain-specific adjustments.

Related concepts include syllabification, syllable, hyphenation, and prosody. The adjective syllabified simply indicates that the process of syllabification has been applied.