Word Counter for DOCX Files

How to count the words of a Word document

1. Drop one or more .docx files on the drop zone, or click it to choose them. You can add more files later: they are appended to the table.
2. Under What to count, choose whether to Include footnotes, Include endnotes and Include comments. The table updates at once.
3. Read the counts in the table: Words, Characters (with spaces), Characters (no spaces), Paragraphs, Sentences and Reading time. With several files, a Total row adds them up.
4. Pick a file in Details for to see its speaking time, the words in each part of the document and its Most frequent words.
5. Click Download the table (CSV) to keep the figures in a spreadsheet.

The documents are opened in your browser with the mammoth library. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for manuscripts, theses, contracts or client reports.

What is counted

A word is a run of letters or digits; an apostrophe or a hyphen between two letters keeps it one word, so l’homme, don’t and peut-être each count once. Punctuation alone, such as a dash between spaces, is not a word. Characters are counted as Unicode characters, so an accented letter or an emoji counts once. Paragraph marks and manual line breaks are not characters; tabs are. Empty paragraphs are not counted as paragraphs. Sentences end with ., !, ? or …, and a paragraph without final punctuation, such as a heading, counts as one sentence.

The text of the body includes tables and text boxes. Deleted tracked changes are ignored and insertions are counted, as if every change had been accepted. Headers and footers are never read: mammoth, the document reader used here, does not expose them. Microsoft Word doesn’t count them either, so this rarely matters.

Reading time assumes 200 words per minute and speaking time 130 words per minute, typical averages for adults reading silently and for a presentation.

Differences from Microsoft Word’s count

The numbers usually match Word’s Word Count dialog within a few words, but some rules differ:

• Word splits words on spaces only. A number such as 3.5, a URL or an e-mail address is one word in Word but two or more here, while a lone – or & counts as a word in Word and not here.
• Word’s dialog has a single Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes box; this tool separates footnotes and endnotes and always counts text boxes. Comments are never counted by Word.
• Word also gives pages and lines. They depend on fonts, margins and page layout, which aren’t computed here.
• Automatic list numbers (1., a)) are not part of the text in either count.

For school or publishing limits, use the count required by the person who set the limit, and leave a small margin.