Ever notice all the hyphens in your hymnal? I pity the guy who had the job of putting them there!
When song lyrics contain words of more than one syllable, the divisions between syllables are marked with hyphens in the score. This allows each syllable to be individually aligned with its musical note.
Some syllables are sung across a series of notes. The score will generally use a curved line called a slur to mark the range of notes assigned to a particular syllable. It may display multiple hyphens for an extended syllable.
The clip of sheet music pictured above shows the hyphenated syllables Glo-ri-a, ex-cel-sis, and De-o in the classic Christmas carol “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Look at all the hyphens following Glo! That single three-letter syllable is spread over sixteen separate notes. Keep an oxygen tank handy when the congregation belts that one out!
Where Do the Hyphens Go?
But Gloria-induced hyperventilation is not the source of the headache I mentioned in my post title. My split-ting headache comes from trying to figure out exactly where to divide words when I type lyrics into a music notation program.
I vaguely remember a few of Sister Mary Adele’s rules from fifth grade grammar:
- End a long-vowel syllable with the vowel.
- End a short-vowel syllable with a consonant.
- Split words between two consecutive consonants, unless they form a diphthong. (Wait a minute, diphthongs combine vowels. What do you call a consonant combination? A gerund? No … I’m getting too old to keep that stuff straight.)
But Sister Mary Adele’s rules don’t always give the right answer. Even words I thought were obvious turned out to be split differently in my hymnal. Where would you place the hyphens in the common word everyone, for example? I didn’t even guess the number of syllables correctly.
What’s a lyricist to do? Use only words of one syllable? Not likely. Insert hyphens wherever they look right to me, and hope no one else knows better? Tempting, but not the most quality-conscious approach.
How to Divide and Conquer Multi-Syllable Words
Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is my hard-copy reference for word spelling, definition, and syllabication. A quicker solution: I keep a browser window open to Dictionary.com while I work on lyrics. When I need to check a word, I type or copy/paste it into the search box and hit Enter. Voila! Dictionary.com displays the word and its derivative forms in hyphenated syllables.
Even if you don’t write music, knowing where to find a word’s correct syllabication might come in handy someday. If you lay out the interior pages of a print-on-demand book in Microsoft Word, for example, you might want to override Word’s hyphenation to tweak a line here or there. Splitting a long word differently (Con-gregation instead of Congre-gation, for example) can improve the appearance of a printed page or break a line of dialogue at a more reader-friendly place in a script.
Edited September 23, 2021: By the way, give yourself a pat on the back if you split everyone into three syllables. But some sources split it like this: eve-ry-one, while others split it like this: ev-ery-one.
Edit January 10, 2016:
Entering hymn lyrics into a digital score by copying and pasting from Microsoft Word is a lot quicker than typing the words directly into the score. To do that, I first have to separate the syllables with a space or a hyphen (depending on the music notation program). Inserting all those spaces/hyphens individually gets pretty time-consuming.
But I recently was tipped off to Lyric Hyphenator, a free online utility from Juicio Brennan. Just paste your text into the on-screen box and click a button to have it hyphenated automatically. If your notation program uses spaces instead of hyphens to separate syllables, you can then use Word’s Find/Replace All function to replace all the hyphens with spaces.
Caveats: Lyric Hyphenator works with standard English words only. You should eyeball the results for accuracy; as always, use a dictionary to check the syllabication of any questionable words or proper names. (Lyric Hyphenator says eve-ry-one; Merriam-Webster says ev-ery-one.)
Linda, I’m so glad you’re in our Christian Poets & Writers group on Facebook, so I could see your link to this post! I’ve been writing poetry since childhood and have a traditionally published book of poems, but I’ve never written song lyrics even though hymns and popular music were my first introduction to poetry. I hope you’ll continue to let us know about songwriting. For now I’ll highlight your post on the blog and hope other musically-inclined poets and writers will see – http://christianpoetsandwriters.blogspot.com. Thanks and blessings.
Thanks, Mary! Let’s add the link to the Facebook group, too, for interested folks.
Extremely helpful! Thanks Linda!
You’re very welcome, Stephen. What kind of writing do you need to syllabicate words for?
So why is the word Savior divided Sav-ior in the hymnal. Shouldn’t it be Sa-vior?
Kevin, that’s a great example to illustrate a point.
I’ve got my Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary open to the sav page. I notice that some words with a long a, like savor and savory, are split after the a (Sister Mary Adele’s rule), while others, like savior and saving, are split after the v.
Notice the difference between the two groups of words? All the words split after the v are forms of the root word save. To clarify the root verb, the derivative words are split between the root sav and the suffixes -ior, -ing, -er, and so on.
The words that are split after the long a are not forms of save.
Similarly, while most words with consecutive consonants are split between the two consonants, words derived from a verb that ends in two consonants are split after the verb root. For example: bur-lap, bur-ger, bur-den, but burn-ing.
All that being said, I gave up relying on my hymnal to show me the correct split, as the hymns are not 100% consistent in splitting some words, especially in scores of older hymns.
Thanks for contributing, Kevin!
P.S. I nosed around your website and discovered what a talented, accomplished composer you are. If you ever get the urge to compose new settings for my texts, have at it! 🙂
Great insights and explanation. Thank you!
My instinct as to why composers might notate ‘sav-ior’ instead of ‘sa-vior’ is because of the ambiguity of ‘vior’ being somewhat words syllables, with a significant indentation in the sound. Thus, for clarity, the ‘v’ is taken away from it to make it clear that ‘ior’ is one syllable instead of leaving ‘vior’. By contrast, in the case of the other two words, ‘sa-vor’ and ‘sa-vo-ry’, there is no ambiguity at all about each syllable being single. With music the decisions must be based on aural inspection, rather than syntactic rules.
Hi, Julian. Thanks for joining the discussion.
Aural vs. syntactic, that is the question. One of my collaborating composers is in the aural camp. He and I have done some good-natured haggling over whether to syllabize my lyrics by the way singers sing the words, or by proper dictionary splits. Figuring that singers routinely lump syllable-ending consonants together with the next syllable, he tends to split after the vowel. For example, in a score he just sent me, he split ci-ty and bu-sy instead of cit-y and bus-y, as Merriam-Webster would have it.
I’m a fan of using correct English, so I generally use established (dictionary) syllabication in my lyrics, same as I do in my narrative books. Singers are well able to grasp the full word as they sing; otherwise, how would they know whether the first-syllable vowel is pronounced long or short? And they’ll sing those syllable-ending consonants in a lump with the next syllable whether I write the score that way or not. 🙂
Your post on hyphenating is the closest I’ve found to answering my question. I too get a headache – but it’s not from figuring out where to put the hyphens. I find it distracting when words put up on a screen (sans notes) are hyphenated. I realize music scores need to have this formatting so musicians know how the notes and lyrics fit together. For straight text I can’t see that it’s necessary.
Hmmm … I don’t recall ever seeing hyphens in projected hymn lyrics. Would be distracting, for sure.
Maybe the person in charge of creating the slides for your church extracted the lyrics from a digital score and didn’t delete the hyphens before pasting the text into PowerPoint?
Hopefully another reader will offer a better explanation.
Thanks for visiting and commenting, Pat!
Thank you, Linda, for your dedication to the craft. Though classically trained (piano, violin and voice), when it came to songwriting I was pretty much on my own. I know what the dictionary says, but it doesn’t make sense to singers. If I’m singing “Mem’ries” from “Cats,” I don’t sing “Mem” and hold it on the second “m,” closing off the note with pursed lips. No one wants to hear that buzzing “m”. Unless directed to do so — It’s just an ugly sound. So I sing “Me-m’ries”, beginning the second syllable with a consonant as God and my choir director intended.
It’s the same deal with “Dancing.” Juicio would have me sing “Danc-ing.” Imagine! If the first note is, say, a dotted half at a slow tempo, I’m hissing that “c” friggin’ forever. “Danssssssss-ing” No! It’s “Da-ncing,” almost three syllables, the “n” sort of slipped in there.
I don’t want to confuse the singer, who may be sight-singing an unfamiliar song. So I put the consonant where I want them to enunciate it, and damn Merriam-Webster. That I use for writing stories, and you should see how beat up my pre-computer pocket edition is!
I’m in the middle of a project putting a hundred songs into computer for a songwriter friend of mine. He insists on going by the dictionary, and I don’t argue with him. They’re his songs and he pays me generously. If they were for publication, for others to sing, I’d have a Conversation. Meanwhile, he’s the boss. And a pretty good tunesmith and lyricist.
Mem-ries is actually what you sing but the m is extremely short. If you sing with a metronome (or record and then check where in the beat the “m” and “r” each appeared) you will find that the beat accent it exactly on the “r” rather than the accent on the “m”. The m appears extremely shortly at the extreme end of the previous beat, then accent (the start of next note) begins on the “r”.
Hi, Daniel. I hear you. If you aren’t constrained to a standard style by a publisher or genre customs, you can do whatever you think works best for your target pool of singers. When you’re collaborating, though, I say the lyricist gets to decide how the lyrics are treated, and the composer gets dibs when there’s a difference of style preferences in the music notation.
Best wishes for your project. Sounds like a whopping job!
Hi Linda,
I found your blog and this article when I was searching for hyphenation advice for my choral composition, and the lyrics include the word ‘Peace’. This word is sung on a whole note, tied to another half note, and then, another word follows.
I used Juicio’s hyphenator tool and it did not hyphenate ‘Peace’, of course it actually sounds like one syllable. So I set it to ‘Peace,____’ (with underscores for the melisma) – although it didn’t look and feel right for me as a singer.
Another composer whom I asked for advice recommended to see it as two syllables and write ‘Pea – ce’ instead, and thus make clearer for the singers where the ‘s’ sound has to fall.
What would you do?
Kind regards
Eva
Hi, Eva. Thanks for popping in.
I would write “Peace” as a single syllable and add the underscore to indicate the extension, making sure the underscore extends to the last connected note. That should be sufficient to inform the singer where the syllable ends.
Of course, conductors and singers can (and do) play a little bit with the exact timing of the ending consonant for purposes of clear diction or expression.
The underscore doesn’t look odd to me. What looks more difficult for my brain to follow is the hyphen(s) when a melisma occurs in the middle of a multi-syllable word. I would be an epic fail as a sight reader. 😀
Thanks for posting this, Linda. Too bad I didn’t find it sooner ha! Figuring out where to put the hyphen when working on scores is always my biggest snag – lyric hyphenator is great!
You’re very welcome, Geof! Hope it makes your work easier from here on out.
Great post! I’m a music teacher who is constantly notating songs for work and church. Hyphenation rules have always perplexed me! This was a big help (I never would have thought to check my work with an online dictionary!)
One thing that would probably make automatic lyrics input trickier is when you have a one-syllable word take up multiple notes. I’ve never tried any sort of automagic lyrics input myself. I worry that I would need to do so much proofing that it would be better to have just typed it in myself.
I generally see the word “everyone” hyphenated as:
“ev’-ry-one”. Avoids all that nonsense with the central “e”. 😀
Take care! 🙂
Hi, Rachel. Thanks for your input about input. 😀
In MuseScore, I copy a whole verse but paste it into the score one note at a time, which actually goes quickly when you get the hang of it. MuseScore copies in one syllable and jumps to the next word when you press CTRL-V. For a multi-syllable word, MuseScore adds the hyphen where indicated in your hyphenated text. When you get to one of those multi-note syllables, you hit the hyphen key as many times as necessary to jump to the next syllable in the word. MuseScore knows what you’re doing, so don’t worry, it won’t add a zillion hyphens. If the slur occurs on the last (or only) syllable of a word, you can hit Shift-Hyphen as many times as necessary to add an extended underscore as you move forward to the next word. If you prefer not to use the extensions, you don’t have to. You can hit the spacebar at the end of the word, click with your mouse on the note that starts the next word, and resume your CTRL-V pasting there.
Personally, I think it was worth getting accustomed to setting up the hyphenated lyrics in Word and pasting them in instead of typing directly into the score. This way I make sure my spelling, wording, and syllabication are accurate in the Word file, once and done. The pasted lyrics will always reflect that accuracy.
Of course, if I’m writing the text as I compose or as I write for an existing musical setting, I often type directly into the score as I work. Then I use the Copy Lyrics tool to paste my finished text into a Word file, save it (!), do my cleanup and hyphenation in Word, delete the draft lyrics from the score, and paste in the clean lyrics from Word.
I rarely see “ev’ry-one”, but I like that solution.