Does word count words

COUNT THE WORDS AS YOU TYPE When you type in a document, Word automatically counts the number of pages and words in your document and displays them on the status bar at the bottom of the workspace. If you don’t see the word count in the status bar right-click the status bar and click Word Count.

What words count in a word count?

Word counts the number of words in a document while you type. Word also counts pages, paragraphs, lines, and characters. When you need to know how many words, pages, characters, paragraphs, or lines are in a document, check the status bar. For a partial word count, select the words you want to count.

Is Microsoft Word word count accurate?

That is because different writing platforms have different ways of calculating the word count of a file. For instance, Google Docs and Microsoft Office will give you two different word counts—even though the text being processed is the same! Thus, they are not entirely reliable.

Does word count include all words?

The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text.

What is the rule for word count?

My general rule of thumb is you’re OK if you turn in an article with 5 percent fewer words to 5 percent more words than assigned. For a 500-word story, that would be 475 words to 525 words. For a 1,000-word story, that would be 950 words to 1,050 words. For a 3,000-word article, it would be 2,850 to 3, 150 words.

What words are not counted in essays?

For concise and meaningful writing, do your best to avoid these words and phrases in your admission essays.

• 1) Contractions.
• 2) Idioms.
• 3-5) “So on,” “etc,” “and so forth“
• 6) Clichés.
• 7-11) “Thing,” “stuff,” “good,” “bad,” “big“
• 12) Slang, jargon, teen speak.
• 13) Rhetorical questions.

How many words does Harry Potter have?

1,084,170 words
The entire Harry Potter series – 1,084,170 words.

Does word count include full stops?

You’ll find use of brackets, hyphens with a space each side, symbols such as = and * with spaces each side, and full stops (e.g. or eg) can have a significant impact on character counts.

Does a full stop count as a word?

Are commas counted as a word? No punctuation is not counted as a word.

Does Turnitin Show word count?

Turnitin’s word count does not count the words in textboxes, footnotes, and endnotes. Turnitin will count each separate word within a URL, however a PDF or Word document will count a URL as one word.

Does word count include prepositions?

Small words such as “a” or “an” are counted. All prepositions, such as “in” or “at” are also counted. All words are counted.

How do you count 150 words in an essay?

How Many Pages Is 150 Words?

1. Answer: 150 words is 0.3 pages single-spaced or 0.6 pages double-spaced.
2. 150 words single-spaced is 0.3 pages.
3. 150 words double-spaced is 0.6 pages.
4. 150 words handwritten and single-spaced make 0.6 pages.
5. 150 words is about 0.75-1.5 paragraphs for essays or 1-3 for easy reading.

How do you count 300 words in an essay?

HOW TO COUNT WORDS IN A COMPOSITION/ESSAY

1. Step 1: Count words per each line.
2. Step 2: Count the lines per page.
3. Step 3: Multiply.
4. Step 4: Because you already know the numbers of words per page, now multiply 176 by the total pages of your composition/essay.

How do you manually count words in an essay?

You know the minimum number of words you need to write for the essay is 250. So in this case, divide 250 with 6, to get 45 – the number of lines you will need to write to reach the word count. You would need about 3 extra lines to leave some space between each paragraph, so add it to 45 and you are left with 48 lines.

How can I find the word count of a book?

How to find a book’s word count: Go to that book’s page and scroll down to “Inside This Book.” Under that heading, click “Text Stats.” (It’ll be a blue link.) A new window will pop up. Under “Number of,” you’ll see “words.” That’s your number!

How many words does a 300 page book have?

90,000 words
How many words does a 300 page book have? A 300-page book word count average is about 90,000 words.

How do you count words in an article?

Use word count

1. Open the Google Docs app .
2. Open a document.
3. Tap More .
4. Tap Word count to see the number of: Words. Characters. Characters excluding spaces.

How do you count words in an assignment?

Insert the word count in your document

1. Click in your document where you want the word count to appear.
2. Click Insert > Quick Parts > Field.
3. In the Field nameslist, click NumWords, and then click OK.
4. To update the word count, right-click the number, and then choose Update Field.

How many words are in Percy Jackson?

The first book in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series — The Lightning Thief — has 86,826 words. True, it goes over 80,000, but it stays under 90,000. The longest book in this series — at 97,069 words — is the fifth, The Last Olympian. And it still stays under 100,000 words.

How many words are in the deathly hallows?

198,227 words
How many words are in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows? There are 198,227 words. While knowing the total number of words in the Harry Potter series isn’t going to convince anyone to read all the books, knowing the total word count is an excellent way to encourage kids to read more.

How many words is the average novel?

Average Word Count For A Novel
The average word count for adult fiction is between 70,000 to 120,000 words. For children’s fiction, the general rule is the younger the audience the shorter the book, and for YA novels the average is 50,000-70,000 words.

Different tools use different algorithms to count words in a document.

For example, Apple’s Pages counts 2-7 mg/v as four words while Microsoft Word counts the same string as two words. Or if for some reason you have a space between a word and the punctuation that ends a sentence: Bla bla !, Word will count the punctuation mark as a word. And then there are the settings that will include headers, tables, and footnotes into the word count, or not. And so on.

But the truth is that unless you are paid by the word (in which case you need to ask the publisher how you should count words and what tool to use), the usually minor differences in word count do not matter when you submit a manuscript to an agent or publisher.

The publisher, when he considers your manuscript for publication, isn’t worried wether he will have to print 563 or 564 pages. What he wants to know is wether your novel is in the range of 60,000 to 80,000 words for a newcomer young adult novel (or whatever you write and whatever the publisher’s range is for that).

And publishers understand word counting with Word. If you send them a Word document or say (in your letter) that you counted your words with Word, they will know from experience what to expect.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The word count is the number of words in a document or passage of text. Word counting may be needed when a text is required to stay within certain numbers of words. This may particularly be the case in academia, legal proceedings, journalism and advertising. Word count is commonly used by translators to determine the price of a translation job. Word counts may also be used to calculate measures of readability and to measure typing and reading speeds (usually in words per minute). When converting character counts to words, a measure of 5 or 6 characters to a word is generally used for English.^[1]

Details and variations of definition[edit]

Variations in the operational definitions of how to count the words can occur (namely, what «counts as» a word, and which words «don’t count» toward the total). However, especially since the advent of widespread word processing, there is a broad consensus on these operational definitions (and hence the bottom-line integer result). The consensus is to accept the text segmentation rules generally found in most word processing software (including how word boundaries are determined, which depends on how word dividers are defined). The first trait of that definition is that a space (any of various whitespace characters, such as a «regular» word space, an em space, or a tab character) is a word divider. Usually a hyphen or a slash is, too. Different word counting programs may give varying results, depending on the text segmentation rule details, and on whether words outside the main text (such as footnotes, endnotes, or hidden text) are counted. But the behavior of most major word processing applications is broadly similar.

However, during the era when school assignments were done in handwriting or with typewriters, the rules for these definitions often differed from today’s consensus. Most importantly, many students were drilled on the rule that «certain words don’t count», usually articles (namely, «a», «an», «the»), but sometimes also others, such as conjunctions (for example, «and», «or», «but») and some prepositions (usually «to», «of»). Hyphenated permanent compounds such as «follow-up» (noun) or «long-term» (adjective) were counted as one word. To save the time and effort of counting word-by-word, often a rule of thumb for the average number of words per line was used, such as 10 words per line. These «rules» have fallen by the wayside in the word processing era; the «word count» feature of such software (which follows the text segmentation rules mentioned earlier) is now the standard arbiter, because it is largely consistent (across documents and applications) and because it is fast, effortless, and costless (already included with the application).

As for which sections of a document «count» toward the total (such as footnotes, endnotes, abstracts, reference lists and bibliographies, tables, figure captions, hidden text), the person in charge (teacher, client) can define their choice, and users (students, workers) can simply select (or exclude) the elements accordingly, and watch the word count automatically update.

Software[edit]

Modern web browsers support word counting via extensions, via a JavaScript bookmarklet, or a script that is hosted in a website. Most word processors can also count words. Unix-like systems include a program, wc, specifically for word counting. There are a wide variety of word counting tools available online.
Different word counting programs may give varying results, depending on the text segmentation rule details. The exact number of words often is not a strict requirement, thus the variation is acceptable.

In fiction[edit]

Novelist Jane Smiley suggests that length is an important quality of the novel.^[2] However, novels can vary tremendously in length; Smiley lists novels as typically being between 100,000 and 175,000 words,^[3] while National Novel Writing Month requires its novels to be at least 50,000 words. There are no firm rules: for example, the boundary between a novella and a novel is arbitrary and a literary work may be difficult to categorise.^[4] But while the length of a novel is to a large extent up to its writer,^[5] lengths may also vary by subgenre; many chapter books for children start at a length of about 16,000 words,^[6] and a typical mystery novel might be in the 60,000 to 80,000 word range while a thriller could be well over 100,000 words.^[7]

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America specifies word lengths for each category of its Nebula Award categories:^[8]

Classification	Word count
Novel	40,000 words or over
Novella	17,500 to 39,999 words
Novelette	7,500 to 17,499 words
Short story	up to 7,500 words

In non-fiction[edit]

The acceptable length of an academic dissertation varies greatly, dependent predominantly on the subject. Numerous American universities limit Ph.D. dissertations to 100,000 words, barring special permission for exceeding this limit.^[9]

See also[edit]

• Flash fiction
• Twitterature
• Word lists by frequency

References[edit]

Sources[edit]

• DeRocher, James E.; Miron, Murray S.; Patten, Sam M.; Pratt, Charles C. (1973), The Counting of Words: A Review of the History, Techniques and Theory of Word Counts with Annotated Bibliography (PDF), Syracuse University Research Corporation, p. 302, ED098814.
• Rothman, Chuck (2005), Word Counts: What Is a Word?, Science Fiction Writers of America. An article on various word count methods in fiction publishing.
• Michaels, Melisa (2005), Focusing on the Wrong Things, Science Fiction Writers of America, archived from the original on April 17, 2009 An article on the relative importance of various word count methods in fiction publishing.

Counting characters, words, and lines is extremely important in content writing for both the writer and the client. The count sets the rate for an entire project and its price. So, if you rely on only one writing platform, you could be misled by the word count feature.

Not sounding like that big of a deal? Well, you could be paying more than you should for your articles.

That is because different writing platforms have different ways of calculating the word count of a file. For instance, Google Docs and Microsoft Office will give you two different word counts—even though the text being processed is the same! Thus, they are not entirely reliable.

“But why is the page count different between Apple Pages and MS Word?” I hear you ask. It is a little complicated, but we have broken it down for you so that it’s easy to understand. Keep reading!

How Do the Most Common Programs Count Words

Have you ever noticed a slight difference between the word count in one word-counting program and another? If you have, hats off to you! You weren’t just “seeing things”—there is a difference between how writing platforms count words.

When these platforms are designed, they have word count algorithms programmed into them. That is a fancy way of saying a programmer fed the platform a formula for counting words. And because all the platforms we use have been made by different companies (Microsoft, Apple, Google, and so on), no two formulas are the same.

To better understand how and why word counts differ between programs, let’s look at the science behind this commonly used feature (hint: it’s easier than it sounds).

The Algorithm for the Microsoft Word Count Feature

Microsoft Word might be the most popular writing platform out there. Its programmers taught it to consider any string of “things” between two spaces of a word. A word doesn’t necessarily have to contain letters. It could simply be a long string of numbers or symbols. For example, “12345” is a word according to Microsoft Word!

Another example of how this algorithm works is looking at these two sequences: “and/or” and “and / or.” You and I might say each sequence counts as two words. However, if you guide yourself by Microsoft Word’s algorithm, the first sequence is only one word (because there are no spaces), and the second is three words (because it counts everything between spaces as a word, even the slash symbol). Odd, right?

Plus, the curiosities don’t end there! Microsoft Word typically counts fewer words than other writing platforms because it does not include headers, footers, and the words in text boxes in its count. However, you can change the settings so that the algorithm starts counting these if you want.

The Algorithm for LibreOffice

LibreOffice might not be as widely used as Word, but it is still a handy tool for content writers and their clients. It works very similarly to its Microsoft counterpart, which is to say it follows an algorithm that is practically identical to that of Microsoft Word. Thus, if you understand Microsoft Word’s counting feature, you also know LibreOffice’s!

Let’s break down the formula LibreOffice uses to tell you how many words are in your document:

• Every string of letters between two spaces is considered a word: This means “and / or” are three words, but “and/or” is only one word.
• Hyphenated words only count as one word: We can gather that, according to LibreOffice, “fast-paced” counts as one word, while “fast-paced” counts as two. That is because, in the first example, there is a hyphen separating the two strings of letters. But in the second example, the space is there instead of the hyphen, which tells LibreOffice it must be two words.
• Combinations of characters and numbers are counted as words if they are between spaces: So, LibreOffice will tell you that “Cat123 $1.34 * https://111.com” is four words because they are all between spaces—whereas you and I would agree that the example has no words, just random numbers, and characters.

Let this remind you that no matter how advanced computers are, they still don’t behave like us and will tolerate all kinds of nonsense!

The Algorithm for Pages

If you have an Apple device, you have likely used Pages before. This language processing tool is the alternative to Microsoft Word and, thus, behaves differently. Out of all the writing platforms, we will be walking you through today, Pages consistently shows users the highest word count.

This is because Pages (unlike Microsoft Word and LibreOffice) counts the words used in charts, graphs, text boxes, headers, and footers. If you’re one to feel super productive when looking at the word count box in the corner of your writing platform, Pages will delight you.

Moreover, Pages has a more innovative word count formula than other text processing tools. If you consider the example we gave earlier, Pages counts “and/or” as two words—just like you and I would. The fact that there isn’t a space between “and” and “or” doesn’t throw off Page’s word count. Additionally, “fast-paced” is also counted as two words.

In fact, this is what the difference between Word and Pages word count primarily comes down to!

The Algorithm for Google Docs
The last writing platform we will take a look at is Google Docs. This program only counts strings of letters and numbers as words.

So, if you write “???” on Google Docs, the platform will tell you there are no words. But if you write down “1234?1234” Google Docs states that two words (here, the question marks are read as a space, thus giving rise to two different terms). On top of all that, Google Docs counts URLs as three distinct words, all separated by symbols (colons, periods, or dashes).

For example, if you write “www.xyz.com” in Google Docs (and Pages, too), you will have three words. But if you write down that same URL address in Word or LibreOffice, you will only have one word. If your article has a lot of links, your word count could be way off.

A Note on Different Languages

All the examples we gave you were in English. Yet, all these writing platforms also apply the same formulas to other languages. To clarify this a little, let’s look at some examples.

In French, question marks (along with some other punctuation marks) are separated from the last word of the sentence by a space. Thus, you could find “Comment ca va ?” (meaning: How are you?) written in a document. Microsoft Word and LibreOffice will count that as four different words, whereas Pages and Google Docs will count as only three.

That makes sense, right?

There are many more examples of how all these popular word-counting features work in different languages—too many for us to go into. However, they always fall into the more general rules we described for each writing platform.

How Words Are Counted in Popular Counting Tools

Does that sound like a lot of information to take in? If it does, don’t worry. The following examples will illustrate all the main differences between word count programs.

• IFO 9002:2017 — Pages and Google Docs tell you this sequence contains three words. LibreOffice and Microsoft Word only count two words. Why? Because the colon between the digits tricks them into seeing the combination as one large number.
• Mary@qwr.com — Pages and Google Docs once more agree this sequence contains three words. LibreOffice and Microsoft Word band together in counting only one term.
• 1,324 — Surprise, surprise: Pages and Google Docs count this number as two words (because the comma there is read as if it were a space, thus giving rise to two words), while Microsoft Word and LibreOffice disagree and both state that it is one word.
• Shouldn’t — Because words such as this (that is to say, contractions) are so common, programmers have tweaked their writing platforms to look at it as just one word. This is true for LibreOffice, Microsoft Word, Pages, and Google Docs. Even if you write two different words and join them with an apostrophe, these processing programs will still count it as one word. Try it out with Mary’Jane!

Practical Examples

Alright, now that we have gone through so many isolated examples, let’s put your understanding of how the word count differs between programs. We will be using the same written text in all these examples (yay for the scientific method!):

Hi, my name is Elmore, and I live on Willow/Harrington street. If you would like to contact me, please use my email address, which is elmore_cook@xyz.com. It will only take you 1.375.20 seconds to get in contact with me. That’s how quick I am at responding to my emails. If you feel that I am unresponsive to my emails, please connect with me through my website, which is www.standfor.willow.com, hope to hear from you soon! If you would like and/or need more details,do let me know!

Signing out,
IFO 9002:2017

Microsoft Word and LibreOffice

In this sample, the total word count is 93 words, and this is how it breaks down:

• Words with no spaces are considered one word, such as “Willow/Harrington” or “and/or”
• Phrases with a combination of characters are considered two words, for example, “IFO 9002:2017”
• URLs are seen as a single word
• Contractions are just one word, such as “shouldn’t” and “that’s”
• Sequences of numbers are one word, such as “1.375.20”
• Email addresses are counted as one word
• Words containing symbols are also one word, such as “Willow/Harrington”

As we have seen before, LibreOffice and Microsoft Word share a word-counting algorithm, so there is no difference here between the two!

Google Docs

In this sample, Google Docs counts 103 words—ten more than Microsoft Word and LibreOffice do! Let’s look at why that happens.

• Words with symbols but no spaces between them are considered two words, which is what happens with “Willow/Harrington”
• Combinations of characters are seen as several words, such as in “IFO 9002:2017” which counts as three words
• Underscores are not read as spaces, which gives rise to “elmore_cook” being read as one single word
• A URL is registered as four words, for example, “www.standfor.willow.com” because the periods between the letters count as a space
• Contractions are counted as just one word, hence “that’s” is not seen as two words
• A number separated by symbols counts as several words; in this case, “1.375.20” is counted as three words
• Email addresses are recorded as more than one word; for example, elmore_cook@xyz.com is three words

Pages

According to Pages, the text we wrote down has 102 words (one fewer than Google Docs). Here is a sneak peek into the logic of the word-counting program.

• Phrases with a combination of characters, numbers, and symbols are read as more than one word; in this case, three words make up “IFO 9002:2017”
• Contractions are counted as a single word, which is why “that’s” is not two words
• A URL is registered as several words; for instance, “www.standfor.willow.com” is read as four words separated by periods
• Underscores are read as spaces, thus resulting in “elmore_cook” being seen as two separate words
• Words with symbols between them (rather than spaces) are still read as two different words, such as in “Willow/Harrington,” which counts as two words

In short, the only way Pages reads this example text differently from Google Docs is in how it treats underscores.

Key Takeaways

Knowing the correct word count is essential for the client and the writer; it is just as important as knowing the difference between character and word count. Using just one software can throw off your count. Thus, when you have a project paid for by the word, you must know precisely how many words you want to pay for.

The easiest way to tackle this problem is to agree to a specific software’s word count feature with the writer. Alternatively, you could use different platforms (for example, the word count difference between Word and Google Docs) to get two different word counts and then find the average between those two programs