Book word count checker
Paste your text or drop a Word file or PDF. Get words, characters, pages and reading time, all in your browser.
- Characters
- 0
- Characters, no spaces
- 0
- Paragraphs
- 0
- Sentences
- 0
- Manuscript pages, double spaced
- 0
- Manuscript pages, single spaced
- 0
- Printed text pages, 6 x 9 in
- 0
- Reading time (260 wpm)
- 0 min
- Read aloud (183 wpm)
- 0 min
- Your text stays in this browser. Nothing is uploaded or saved.
The share link holds only the word count, never your text.
Rather have a pro handle this? Our studio can: book editing.
Short answer
To check a book's word count, paste the text or drop a Word .docx or a PDF. This manuscript word counter reads it in your browser, with nothing uploaded. It shows words, characters, paragraphs and sentences, then estimates pages and reading time. An 80,000 word novel is about 317 double spaced manuscript pages and 5 h 8 min of reading.
How to use it
- Paste a chapter or your whole manuscript into the box.
- Or drop a Word .docx, a PDF or a plain text file on the tool, or choose one.
- Pick Fiction or Non-fiction for the reading time.
- Read the counts, page estimates and reading times as they update.
- Copy the counts, download a report, or share the word count.
How it works
A word is any run of characters between spaces that has at least one letter or number in it. Characters count every letter, space and mark. Paragraphs are lines with text on them, and a sentence ends at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a new sentence.
Manuscript pages = words / about 253 (double spaced)
Reading time = words / 260 words a minute (fiction) or 238 (non-fiction)
Read aloud = words / 183 words a minute
Printed pages = text pages at 6 x 9 in, without front or back matter
Worked example: "The rain had stopped. "Are you coming?" she asked." has 9 words, 50 characters, 42 without spaces and 2 sentences. The dialogue tag after the question mark stays in the same sentence because it starts with a small letter.
Reading a .docx or PDF without uploading it
A .docx file is a zip archive of XML files. The counter opens the archive in your browser, unpacks the main document with the browser's built-in decompression and reads the text of each paragraph. No library and no server are involved.
A PDF stores where each letter sits on the page, not words. To count words in a PDF, the counter unpacks each page the same way, decodes the letters from the fonts in the file, and treats a wide gap as a space and a new line as a line break. It leaves out running heads, footers and page numbers, and joins words hyphenated at the end of a line. The text appears in the box, so you can check it before you rely on the count.
Reference
Pages and reading time by word count, from the same models.
| Words | Manuscript pages | Printed text, 6 x 9 in | Reading, fiction | Read aloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 | 4 | 4 | 4 min | 5 min |
| 5,000 | 20 | 18 | 19 min | 27 min |
| 20,000 | 80 | 64 | 1 h 17 min | 1 h 49 min |
| 50,000 | 198 | 164 | 3 h 12 min | 4 h 33 min |
| 80,000 | 317 | 262 | 5 h 8 min | 7 h 17 min |
| 100,000 | 396 | 336 | 6 h 25 min | 9 h 6 min |
| 120,000 | 475 | 402 | 7 h 42 min | 10 h 56 min |
Questions authors ask
Is my manuscript uploaded anywhere?
No. The text you paste and any file you drop, Word or PDF, are read by your own browser. Nothing is sent to a server or saved, and the share link holds only the word count. Close the tab and the text is gone.
How do I see the word count in Word or Google Docs?
In Microsoft Word the count is in the status bar at the bottom of the window; click it, or choose Review, then Word Count, for characters, paragraphs and whether footnotes are included. In Google Docs choose Tools, then Word count (Ctrl+Shift+C, or Cmd+Shift+C on a Mac), and tick Display word count while typing to keep it on screen. Use this checker for a PDF, for pages and reading time, or to count a whole book in one place.
Will the count match Microsoft Word?
It should be close. It counts runs of characters between spaces, so "wasn't" and a hyphenated word each count once, and it skips marks that stand alone, like a spaced dash. Word may count those marks, and it can include footnotes, so its total can differ by a few words.
Can I count words in a PDF?
Yes. Drop the PDF and its text appears in the box, read on your device. Running heads, footers and page numbers are left out, and words split by a hyphen at the end of a line count once. Paragraph and sentence counts are estimates, since a PDF stores lines, not paragraphs. A scanned PDF is a picture with no text to count, and a password protected one cannot be read. An old .doc file needs saving as .docx in Word first.
What does it count in a .docx file?
The main text, including tables and text boxes. It leaves out footnotes, endnotes, headers and footers. Deleted text in tracked changes is not counted; inserted text is. There is no set length limit: a whole novel counts in a moment, and Word files up to 50 MB can be dropped.
What is a typical book word count?
It depends on the genre. Writer's Digest puts most adult fiction at 70,000 to 109,999 words, and science fiction and fantasy at 90,000 to 124,999. The novel length checker shows where your book word count sits for each genre.
How are manuscript pages worked out?
A standard manuscript page is US Letter with 1 in margins and 12 pt Times New Roman. Our page model fits about 253 words on a double spaced page, so 80,000 words is about 317 pages. Real pages vary with dialogue and short paragraphs.
How is reading time calculated?
From the average adult silent reading rate in a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert: 260 words a minute for fiction and 238 for non-fiction. Reading aloud averages 183 words a minute. At those rates 80,000 words takes about 5 h 8 min as fiction, 5 h 36 min as non-fiction, and 7 h 17 min read aloud.
Before and after this step
- Previous stepWriting sprint timer
- Next stepWord count to pages
Read the guide
Related tools
Sources
Last verified against Brysbaert's 2019 reading rate meta-analysis. Page counts are our own estimate from the word count to pages model. Every reader and every layout differs, so treat times and pages as estimates.