How to use the essay word counter
- Paste your essay into Your essay.
- Leave Words per page, single-spaced at 500 and Words per page, double-spaced at 250, or change them to match your brief.
- Enter your Word limit (optional) to see the words left, or the words over the limit, and the share of the limit used.
- Read the counts. Edit the text and check again.
What it does and when to use it
Use it before you submit: to check you are inside the word limit, to see whether a paragraph has grown too long, or to turn “about four pages” into a word target. Average sentence length is a quick style check: a high average often means a few sentences need splitting. For a fuller check, the readability score checker gives six grade-level scores. To plan the essay before you write, try the essay outline builder. For a general word counter with more text statistics, see the word counter.
How it works
- Words: runs of letters or digits, with apostrophes and hyphens kept inside a word.
- Characters: user-perceived characters, so an emoji or an accented letter counts once. “Without spaces” removes all spaces and line breaks.
- Sentences: text ending in “.”, “!”, “?” or “…” followed by a space or the end.
- Paragraphs: blocks separated by a blank line.
- Pages: words ÷ words per page, rounded to one decimal.
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Worked examples
Over the limit. “Climate change is real. It affects us all!” then a blank line and “What can we do? Act now.” with a 10-word limit: 14 words, 4 sentences, 2 paragraphs and Words over the limit: 4, which is 140% of the limit.
Room to spare. The sample essay on school start times has 104 words in 8 sentences, an average of 13 words. With a 150-word limit the tool shows Words left: 46 (69% used). With 300 words per double-spaced page it fills 0.3 of a page.
Abbreviations. “Dr. Lee met Ms. Khan.” has 5 words but shows Sentences: 3, because each full stop after “Dr” and “Ms” counts.
Limits and tips
- Word processors count slightly differently, especially around dashes, numbers and abbreviations. If your course names a program, its count is the official one.
- Footnotes, tables and image captions are counted only if you paste them.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages is my essay?
Does it count headings and references?
How are words counted?
Why is my sentence count too high?
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