counter-word

What is a word count?

A word count is the number of words in a piece of text. The interesting part is what counts as a word — and there is no single answer.

The working definition

Almost every tool defines a word as an unbroken sequence of characters separated by whitespace. Under that rule the sentence you are reading has a count you could verify by hand, and so would every word processor.

It works well for English and every other language written with spaces between words. It breaks entirely for Chinese, Japanese and Thai, which do not separate words that way. For those, character counts are the meaningful measure.

The cases where tools disagree

CaseExampleUsual treatment
Hyphenated compoundstate-of-the-artOne word
Contractiondon'tOne word
Number2026One word
Decimal3.14One word
Email addressyou@example.comOne word
URLhttps://example.com/pageOne word
Em dash between wordshere—thereTwo words
AmpersandR&DOne word
InitialsJ. R. R. TolkienFour words

These conventions matter more than they look. A technical document dense with URLs, code and hyphenated terms can differ by several per cent between tools, purely from these rules.

Why word counts exist at all

A word count is a proxy for effort, for the reader's time, and for cost, and it is used because it is the only measure of those things that can be checked instantly and disputed by nobody.

  • Education. A limit forces selection. Deciding what to leave out is most of the skill being assessed.
  • Publishing. Word counts map to pages, and pages map to printing costs and shelf space.
  • Journalism. Column inches were physical before they were metaphorical.
  • Translation and copywriting. Per-word rates make the count the invoice.
  • Applications. A limit imposed on thousands of applicants makes comparison possible.
A word count measures length, not quality, and the two are unrelated. A 500-word limit met exactly says nothing about whether the 500 words were worth reading.

Common questions

Is a hyphenated word one word or two?

One, in the convention used by Microsoft Word, Google Docs and this site. A few tools split on the hyphen, which is the most common source of a discrepancy between two counters.

Do numbers count as words?

Yes. A date, a figure or a page reference is counted as one word by nearly every tool, on the basis that a reader encounters it as a single unit.

How do you count words in Chinese or Japanese?

By characters, not words. Those languages do not separate words with spaces, so whitespace-based counting produces meaningless results. Publishing and translation in those languages price by character.

Tools for this