Paste it. Every syllable, every rule, every boundary.
Pinyin Spelling Checker
Is xv a syllable? Is xian one or two?
Should it be liou or liu?
Type anything below and every syllable is checked against all
410 real ones — with the rule named whenever one is broken.
Nothing you type leaves this browser.
The Four Rules the Checker Applies
Pinyin is written with 23 initials and 34 finals, and they combine into exactly 410 syllables — no more. Almost everything a learner gets wrong is one of four spelling conventions, and all four exist because pinyin is trying to keep syllable boundaries visible without using a space.
1. ü is written u after j, q, x and y
The sound is still ü. The dots come off because those four initials never take a plain u, so
nothing can be confused: ju, qu, xu, yu are
all ü. After l and n the dots stay on, because lu and lü really
are different syllables. And v is not a pinyin letter at all — it is the key your
input method gives you for ü.
2. iou, uei and uen contract after an initial
Those three finals are written in full only when they stand alone, as you,
wei and wen. Put an initial in front and they shrink:
iou → iu (liu, jiu, xiu), uei → ui (gui, shui, dui),
uen → un (lun, cun, hun). Somebody who writes liou has not invented
anything; they have written the real, uncontracted form in a position where pinyin forbids it.
3. y and w are written in front of a bare final
A final beginning with i, u or ü cannot be written bare when it is the whole syllable:
i → yi, in → yin, ia → ya, u → wu,
uo → wo, ü → yu. The y and w are not extra sounds — they are there so
every syllable begins with a consonant letter, which is what makes the breaks visible.
4. The apostrophe goes before a, e and o
Only 12 of the 410 syllables begin with a vowel, and they are the entire reason the apostrophe exists: without it, the letters of such a syllable look like the tail of the one before. It is not decoration and it is not optional — it belongs before every syllable starting with a, e or o that follows another syllable, and nowhere else.
Where One Syllable Ends: Three Words From This Site's Own Dictionary
This is the part a spell-checker usually gets wrong. Given a run of letters, it finds the longest
syllable it can and stops — so it reports xian and never mentions that
xi'an exists. This checker does the opposite: it finds every way the letters
split, shows all of them and does not pick one for you. What it does instead is
point at the apostrophe, which is the thing that actually tells them apart.
These are not examples written for this paragraph. They are spellings the site's dictionary already reads two different ways — 58 of its words carry an apostrophe of their own — so the rule below is the one the dictionary itself follows.
| Letters | Can be |
|---|---|
| jie | 借 jiè (one syllable) or 饥饿 jī'è (2 syllables) |
| tuan | 团 tuán (one syllable) or 图案 tú'àn (2 syllables) |
Notice what the readings with two syllables have in common: each writes an apostrophe, because its second syllable begins with a vowel. That is the whole rule, and it is why a string written without an apostrophe usually has only one legal reading — the checker says which, and shows you the others so you can see what the apostrophe was protecting you from.
Why This Cannot Be Answered In General
The answer is the string
"Is my pinyin right?" has no general answer. Whether xv is a syllable and
whether fangan is one word or two are facts about those exact letters, and
the only way to settle them is to check them against the list.
It names the rule, not just the error
Being told "that is wrong" teaches nothing. Every problem here is repaired by undoing one named convention, and the repair is offered as a button, so the next word you write is the one that gets it right.
It refuses to guess
Where letters split more than one way, the page shows every reading and names none of them as the answer. A checker that quietly picks one is confidently wrong on exactly the inputs it exists for, and you would have no way of telling. This one shows every reading instead.
The same table the interactive pinyin chart is built from, so this page and that one can never disagree about what Mandarin contains. Only 12 syllables begin with a vowel — the apostrophe rule applies to those and nothing else.