I think it's got one long syllable, ie with a long vowel.

With absolutely no reference to texts / teachings beyond what I can remember at this point (and no quality guarantees on that!!!)

- there are 'pure vowels' and 'diphthongs', which are basically combinations where the vowel sound moves from one to another. 'tail' has a diphthong as the sound moves from 'a' to 'y' (yeah, I know it's a half-vowel technically, BUT! And I've just been leading the Latin thread and remember they thought 'i' and 'y' were the same.)

- there are also short and long vowels.

- pure vowels are generally short. cat, vet, pin, hot, but, huh. But (I think) there are occasionally long ones too - too as opposed to took, hoop as opposed to hood.
Off topic, but Latin poetic meter is all about arrangements of long vs short vowels/syllables, whereas English meter is focused on stress/emphasis.

- and of course as the examples above illustrate, English spelling is such a mishmash that many 'long' syllables are written with one vowel in them and many 'short' ones with two. Pity the foreign language student - especially those whose native tongue orthography handles vowel length better! There is a famous pronunciation book for teachers of English as a second language 'Do you say ship or sheep?'


...Jackie, is there any difference for you between the number of syllables in 'tail' and the number of syllables in 'tale'?