PDF Word Counter
Word, character and sentence counts for PDFs — per page, per file and in total.
Word count
Files
| File | Pages | Words | Characters (no spaces) | Characters | Sentences | Reading time | Remove |
|---|
Pages
| Page | Words | Characters (no spaces) | Characters | Sentences | Lines | Status |
|---|
About the PDF Word Counter
Drop one PDF or a whole batch and get the number of words, characters (with and without spaces), sentences, paragraphs, lines and pages — for every page, for every file and for all of them together — plus the reading time.
It is built for the jobs where the exact count matters: quoting a translation, checking an essay or report against a word limit, or estimating how long a document takes to read. Running headers, footers and page numbers are left out by default, numbers can be excluded, and repeated sentences can be counted once, the way translation tools treat repetitions. The result exports to CSV for a quote or an invoice. Your PDFs are read on your device and never uploaded.
How to use it
- Drop one or more PDFs onto the box above, or tap Choose PDFs. Every page is read straight away; password-protected files ask for their password.
- Choose what to count: keep Leave out running headers, footers and page numbers on for the body text only, tick Don’t count numbers as words if your client excludes them, and Count repeated sentences once to see and drop repetitions.
- Type a page range in Pages (for example
5-40) to count only part of each file, and pick a reading speed for the reading-time estimate. - Read the totals and the per-page table. Pages that are scanned images are marked — run them through OCR first. Press Download CSV (one row per file or per page) or Copy summary.
Examples
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
9 words · 44 characters with spaces · 36 without · 1 sentence
information split as “infor-” at the end of one line and “mation” on the next
1 word: “information” (the line-break hyphen is removed; real compounds such as “well-known” keep theirs and also count as one word)
“Confidential — Page 3 of 40” at the bottom of each page
The footer and page numbers are left out of every count; untick the option to include them
Common uses
- Quoting a translation by the word or by the character, with repetitions shown separately.
- Checking a thesis, assignment or report PDF against a word limit without copying its text.
- Comparing the length of several PDFs at once — for example chapters or submitted papers.
- Estimating reading time for a white paper, a manual or a newsletter issue.
What is counted, exactly
- Words follow the Unicode word rules (UAX #29), like the Word Counter: contractions (“don’t”) and hyphenated compounds (“well-known”) count as one word, numbers such as “2026” or “1,00,000” count as words unless you exclude them, and punctuation on its own (“—”, “•”) is not a word.
- Characters are the characters you see: an accented letter, an emoji or a Devanagari syllable written with several code points counts once. With spaces includes the spaces between words but not line or paragraph breaks; without spaces leaves all white space out.
- Sentences use the same rules as the Sentence Counter: “Dr.”, “e.g.” and “No. 5” don’t end a sentence, while a heading or a list item counts as a sentence of its own. A sentence cut by a column or page break, where the next column or page goes on with a lower-case word, is counted once, on the page where it starts.
- Lines are the text lines as laid out on the PDF page, and paragraphs are rebuilt from line spacing, indents and font sizes.
The text is put back into reading order first — columns one after another — with the same engine as PDF to Text, and words split by a hyphen at a line end are joined, so a word broken across two lines is counted once.
Counts for translation quotes
With Count repeated sentences once on, a sentence that already appeared earlier — on another page or in another of the files you dropped — is left out of the totals, and the number of words in such repetitions is shown separately, so you can charge them at your repetition rate. Sentences are compared exactly, after spaces are normalised: “Page 3” and “Page 4” are different sentences.
The CSV has one row per file (with an All files row) or one row per page, with words, numbers, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs, lines and repeated words. It opens directly in Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice.
Reading time
Reading time is the word count divided by a reading speed. The presets are the averages for adults reading English found by a meta-analysis of 190 studies: 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction when reading silently, and 183 when reading aloud (Brysbaert, 2019, Journal of Memory and Language 109, 104047). You can type your own speed instead.
Limitations
- Scanned pages and photos contain a picture of text, not text, so they count as 0 words. They are flagged: make the PDF searchable with OCR PDF and count the result.
- Some PDFs use fonts that don’t say which letter each shape is (common with Hindi and other complex scripts in older PDFs); such characters can’t be read by any tool and are missing from the counts. The affected pages are marked.
- Text inside form fields, comments and attachments is not part of the page text and is not counted.
- Word counts can differ slightly from Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, which use their own rules for dashes, slashes and symbols. Chinese and Japanese have no spaces between words, so their words are found with a dictionary — compare by characters for those languages.
- Running headers are detected when the same line appears at the top or bottom of at least half of the pages, so a single-page PDF only loses bare page numbers.
- The first count downloads the PDF engine once (about 0.5 MB), so it needs an internet connection.
Privacy
Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF uploaded to count the words?
No. The PDF is opened and read inside your browser, and the counting happens there too. Nothing about the file or its text is sent to a server.
Why is my count different from Microsoft Word?
Word counts the text it has, including text boxes and footnotes, and treats some symbols differently. A PDF also often has running headers, footers and page numbers that Word would keep in a separate area — this tool leaves those out by default. Untick Leave out running headers, footers and page numbers to count everything on the page.
Can I count the words in a scanned PDF?
Not directly — a scanned page is an image. The counter marks such pages. Run the file through OCR PDF to add a text layer, then drop the searchable copy here.
Can I count several PDFs together?
Yes. Drop all of them at once (or add more later): you get a row per file, a grand total, and a CSV with one row per file or per page. Repetitions are found across all the files you count together.
Does it count characters for Hindi, Chinese or Arabic text?
Yes — characters are counted as you see them, so a Devanagari syllable or an accented letter counts once. For Chinese and Japanese, characters are usually the better measure than words.
Are numbers counted as words?
Yes by default, as in most word processors. Tick Don’t count numbers as words to leave out words made only of digits and number punctuation (2026, 3.5, 1,200); the number of numbers is still shown.