Sentence Counter

There is nothing to configure. The figures react as you work.

1. Paste your essay, article, email or script into the Input box, or start typing. Paste reads from the clipboard and Clear empties the box.
2. Watch the panel of figures under the box: Sentences, Words, Characters, Characters (no spaces), Paragraphs, Lines and Reading time.
3. Edit the text in place to reach a target and watch the numbers change.
4. Press Copy counts to copy the figures as text, or Download text to save what you typed.

For the input Hi there. How are you? the panel shows 2 sentences, 5 words, 22 characters, 18 characters without spaces, 1 paragraph, 1 line and a reading time of 1 min. The text never leaves your device, so unpublished manuscripts and confidential reports are safe to paste.

Knowing the rules helps you judge when a number looks wrong.

• Sentences. A sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis character that is followed by whitespace or the end of the text. A group of marks such as ?! or ... counts once. Line breaks are treated like spaces, so lines without end punctuation join the next sentence. Text with no punctuation at all counts as one sentence, and empty text counts as zero.
• Words. A word is a run of letters, digits, apostrophes and hyphens. Well-known and don't count as one word each, but 3.50 counts as two, and e.g. counts as two. A lone hyphen also counts as a word, while a dash character does not. Chinese and Japanese text has no spaces, so each unbroken run counts as one word.
• Characters. Every character counts, spaces and line breaks included. The no-spaces figure removes all whitespace.
• Paragraphs and lines. Paragraphs are blocks separated by blank lines. Lines are counted at every line break, blank lines included.
• Reading time. The word count divided by 200, rounded to the nearest whole minute, with a minimum of 1 minute whenever there is text. So 600 words show 3 min, 250 words show 1 min and 1,000 words show 5 min.

The counter reads punctuation, not meaning, so a few patterns throw it off.

• Abbreviations. A title such as Dr. Brown contains a full stop followed by a space, so it adds an extra sentence.
• Closing quotation marks. In He said "stop." Then he left. the quotation mark after the full stop hides the break, and the counter reports 1 sentence instead of 2.
• Missing spaces. One. Two.Three. Four counts 3, because Two.Three has no space after the full stop.
• Lists. Bullet points without end punctuation merge into a single sentence, because the line breaks count as spaces.
• Decimals and web addresses. These are not split, which is usually what you want.

For tidy counts, join hard-wrapped lines first with the remove line breaks tool. The whitespace remover clears doubled spaces and the word counter adds platform limits and a list of the most used words.

Divide the word count by the sentence count to get the average sentence length. For the example above that is 5 words over 2 sentences, or 2.5. Plain English guidance often suggests an average of roughly 15 to 20 words for a general audience, with short sentences for emphasis and longer ones for detail. A paragraph that averages 35 words is a prompt to split some sentences.

Reading time helps with planning. A 1,000 word article takes about five minutes to read silently at 200 words per minute. Spoken delivery is slower, usually 130 to 150 words per minute, so a five minute speech needs around 650 to 750 words. For a full set of scores such as Flesch reading ease and grade level, paste the same text into the readability score checker.