Word counter

What counts as a word here

A word is a run of letters or digits, kept whole across apostrophes, hyphens and internal periods. In practice that means:

• don't is one word, whether you typed a straight or a curly apostrophe.
• state-of-the-art is one word, not four.
• 3.14 and 1,000,000 are one word each.
• U.S.A. is one word.
• A link or an email address is one word, not a handful of fragments.
• A stray dash, ampersand or bullet on its own is not a word.

Those choices are deliberate and they are the ones most likely to put us a few words apart from another tool. The hyphen rule is the big one: a 2,000-word article with forty hyphenated compounds in it will read about eighty words longer in a counter that splits on hyphens. Why word counts disagree works through the arithmetic on a real paragraph.

Word counts people are usually chasing

If you are writing to a target, these are the lengths that come up most often:

• College application essay — 500 to 650 words.
• Blog post that ranks — 1,000 to 2,000 words, though usefulness beats length.
• Abstract — 150 to 250 words.
• Cover letter — 250 to 400 words.
• LinkedIn post — around 150 words before it is truncated.
• Novel — 70,000 to 100,000 words for most adult fiction.

The full word count targets page covers about forty more, from a haiku to a doctoral thesis, with the reason each convention exists.

When a word count is a hard limit

There is a practical difference between a target and a cap. A target is editorial advice and nobody counts it. A cap is enforced by a form field, and the form field is doing its own counting, usually with rules that are not yours.

If a submission system will reject you at 651 words, the safe approach is to come in three or four words under, paste the final text into the actual form, and read the counter the form gives you. Almost every difference between our number and theirs comes from hyphens, em dashes used without spaces, or a trailing block of references that you did not intend to submit. It is worth checking before the deadline rather than after.

Trimming without losing the argument

Word counts are usually cut in the wrong place. The instinct is to delete adjectives, but adjectives are cheap; the expensive words are structural. In most first drafts, between five and ten per cent of the length is recoverable from four habits:

• Throat-clearing openers. It is important to note that, In this essay I will argue, One of the things that. Almost always removable without changing the sentence.
• Nominalisations. Made a decision → decided. Carried out an investigation of → investigated. Each one buys back two or three words and usually reads better.
• Restated topic sentences. If a paragraph opens by summarising the one before it, the summary is a seam left in from drafting.
• Doubled examples. Two illustrations of the same point are one illustration and a spare.

Watch the unique words figure in the panel above while you do this. If the total word count falls and unique words barely moves, you have removed repetition. If unique words falls at the same rate, you are cutting content, and the piece will start to feel thin.

Reading and speaking time

Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average for adults reading English prose for comprehension. Speaking time assumes 150, which is a comfortable presentation pace — useful when a talk has a hard slot and you need to know whether to cut a paragraph. Both figures, and when to distrust them, are covered in reading time and speaking time.

Common questions