Show 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. The status bar shows the word count for that selection and for the entire document.
Tip: Find the number of characters, paragraphs, and lines by clicking on the word count in the status bar.
Count the number of characters, lines, and paragraphs
You can view the number of characters, lines, paragraphs, and other information in your Word for Mac, by clicking the word count in the status bar to open the Word Count box. Unless you have selected some text, Word counts all text in the document, as well as the characters, and displays them in the Word Count box as the Statistics.
Count the number of words in a part of a document
To count the number of words in only part of your document, select the text you want to count. Then on the Tools menu, click Word Count.
Just like the Word desktop program, Word for the web counts words while you type.
If you don’t see the word count at the bottom of the window, make sure you’re in Editing view (click Edit Document > Edit in Word for the web).
Click the word count to switch it off and on.
Maybe you noticed that Word for the web gives you an approximate word count. That’s because it doesn’t count words in areas like text boxes, headers, footers, and SmartArt graphics. If you need an exact count, click Open in Word, and look at the word count at the bottom of the Word document window.
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Want to know the word count of your document in Apple Pages? Here’s how to view the word count in Pages.
Whenever typing up a document, whether it’s for your college, university, or office, it’s important to know its length in terms of pages, words, or even characters. If you use Pages on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad to create your documents, you may need to view these statistics.
While the option is hidden by default, Apple makes it easy to see the word count and other statistics in Pages. We’ll cover how to enable and view them easily.
How to View Word Count in Pages on Mac
Follow the steps below to enable and view the word count in Pages on your Mac:
- Open up the document you want to enable the word count for in Pages.
- Click on View on the top-left of the Pages window, and select Show Word Count.
- You’ll see a box appear at the bottom of your Pages document. This will show you the word count of the document.
- You can switch between characters, paragraphs, and pages by clicking on the word count box. Simply select your desired count to keep it displayed at the bottom of the window.
The statistics in Pages are shown for the entire document by default. However, if you select a specific portion of the text by dragging your cursor through it, you’ll see the word count at the bottom change to your specific selection.
This is helpful if you want to know the word count of a section of your text—for example, the introduction of an article.
If you want to hide the word count again, click on View > Hide Word Count from the menu bar.
How to View Word Count in Pages on iPad
Viewing the word count in a document in Pages is similarly quite easy. To do this, tap on View Options (square icon) on the top left, and turn on the toggle for Word Count. Tap on Done, and you should see the word count at the bottom of the screen. Tap on it to view the additional counts.
How to View Word Count in Pages on iPhone
To view the word count in Pages on your iPhone, open up a document and tap on More (three dots) on the top-right. Turn on the toggle for Word Count, and tap on Done. You should now see the word count at the bottom of the window. Tapping on this will show you the other counts. Select Done once you’re done.
To view word counts for specific portions of text work, simply highlight a portion of the text, and the word count will be updated automatically alongside the other statistics.
View the Word Count in Pages Easily
Viewing the word count and other related statistics is quite easy in Pages. It isn’t obvious at first, but it can also be very helpful, depending on the type of document you’re creating.
It can also help you quickly draft documents that need to be within a specific word or character count. Similarly, you can tailor specific portions of documents (such as research papers) to a specified word count.
I guess professional translators and other professionals who often deal with word and character count are well acquainted with this magic formula. Are you?
You may count your productiveness as, for example, 1 page per day. How much is it in characters? Characters with spaces? Lines? Being commonly asked to create text with a certain word count, I still sometimes get lost. So I took a page of plain text with a little formatting, and the statistics are…
| Characters with spaces | Characters without spaces | Words | Lines | |
| 10 pt | 4972 | 4283 | 697 | 55 |
| 12 pt | 3838 | 3311 | 535 | 46 |
Your word and character count may vary depending on page margin, applied font, font size, spacing, etc. For example, in a one page A4 with single line spacing, in Arial typeface are the following number of characters, words, and lines:
| Characters with spaces | Characters without spaces | Words | Lines | |
| 10 pt | 5153 | 4391 | 769 | 93.7 |
| 12 pt | 3542 | 3034 | 512 | 64.4 |
| 14 pt | 2682 | 2307 | 378 | 48.8 |
| 16 pt | 2129 | 1829 | 302 | 38.7 |
Once we change single to 1.5 line spacing in the text, figures contrast sharply:
| Characters with spaces | Characters without spaces | Words | Lines | |
| 10 pt | 3426 | 2938 | 492 | 62.3 |
| 12 pt | 2370 | 2039 | 332 | 43.1 |
| 14 pt | 1840 | 1577 | 263 | 33.5 |
| 16 pt | 1319 | 1123 | 196 | 24.0 |
Just to keep in mind, the average one spaced page usually contains about 3000 characters or 500 words. Depending on the text formatting, a page word count may include from 200 (large print) up to 600 words (academic book).
Count characters and words with the AnyCount tool for a precise estimate and get every single cent you’ve earned. Try it absolutely free here.
May 11, 2012 9:45 PM in response to Joan Peck
I am replying to myself. Just after I posted my question I saw a list of similar queries from others. Got my answer: look into «info» in the doc section of Inspector.
I did try entering «word count» into the help and got no response whatsoever. Wonder why?
Question marked as
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Helpful
May 11, 2012 10:25 PM in response to Joan Peck
Better you download the Pages User Guide from your Pages Help menu. I find it better than the Help in Pages.
Question marked as
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Helpful
May 11, 2012 11:07 PM in response to Joan Peck
Hi Joan,
A ‘live’ word count of the entire document is reported at the bottom left of the document window.
Here 125% is the magnification at which the screen image of a page is being presented, 1 is the number of ‘words’ that is selected, 4,007 is the total word count for the document, 6-9 are the pages (partially) visible on the screen, and 27 is the total page count for the document.
You can also obtain a word count via the Edit menu:
Other options in this sub-menu are greyed as nothing was selected at the time.
Regards,
Barry
May 12, 2012 7:43 PM in response to Barry
Hi Barry — thanks for the reply. I do not see the same information you see when I look at the lower left of my page. I see the size of page with arrows next to increase or decrease magnification, then the page number of total pages. I am using version 3.03. When I try the feature Show Statistics under Edit, I do not get anything. How did you grab those screen shots and insert them? Awesome.
Joan
May 12, 2012 10:43 PM in response to Joan Peck
Pages 08 doesn’t have the word count on the document. It will only show in the Inspector palette > Document > Info. The Show statistic will open the palette too.
May 12, 2012 10:55 PM in response to Joan Peck
Hi Joan,
The ‘live’ word count was apparently added with Pages ’09.
With Pages ’08 v3.0.3, I get the same display at the bottom left of the page as you, ino the cluding another pair of triangles used to move to to the next or previous page—not quite the same as clicking in the space below or above the ‘thumb’ in the scroll bar—these move the next/previous defined page, rather than the next/previous screen.
Edit > Show Statistics
brings up the Document Inspector, with the Info pane selected:
You can get to the same place with these steps:
- Click the Inspector button.
- In the Inspector, click the first button (Document)
- In the Document Inspector, click the Info button.
Screen shots have been built in to the Mac OS almost forever. Shift-command-3 takes a shot of the whole screen, and places it in a file named either ‘Picture n’ where n is a serial number for the individual shot (in recent OS X versions this has been changed to ‘Screen Shot…’ with a date/time identifier appended).
Add ctrl (control) to the keystroke combination, and the shot goes to the clipboard rather than a file, and the shot may be pasted into a document.
Use ‘3’ in place of ‘4’, and you get a cross-hair cursor, which you can use to select only part of the screen to include in your screen shot.
Summary (for those of you taking notes, write this down. 😉 )
shift-command-4: shot of whole screen, saved to the Desktop as ‘Picture n’ or ‘Screen Shot…’
shift-command-3: gives a crosshair cursor. Drag a rectangle to enclose the part of the screen you want included, then release the mouse button. shot is saved to the Desktop as ‘Picture n’ or ‘Screen Shot…’ (This is the process used for most screen shots posted to these forums.)
shift-ctrl-command-4: As shift-command-4, but shot is copied to clipboard, not to a file.
shift-ctrl-command-3: As shift-command-3, but shot is copied to clipboard, not to a file.
Screen shots (and other images) posted here must start asa file on your computer.
Click the camera icon at the top of the Compose window.
Click choose file in the dialogue that opens.
Navigate to and select the file you want to place in the message.
Click Choose.
Click Insert file.
Regards,
Barry
Jul 10, 2014 9:17 AM in response to Barry
Hi guys. I know this is a really old post but I just purchased my iMAC in December 2013 so the program may be updated. I found that if you click the ‘view’ icon in the upper lefthand corner of your Pages document that you can select ‘word count’ there. It’s a little easier than the other route. Just thought I’d give some feedback.
Jul 11, 2014 5:55 AM in response to Joan Peck
Word count is shown in:
Pages ’09
Enable Pages Preferences > General: check Show word count at window bottom. 2 Page view is in the percentage selector. Looks like this:
Pages v5 (5.2 as of this post date)
View > Show Word Count. The word count display is also capable of showing characters without spaces, characters with spaces, paragraphs, and pages.
Roll your pointer over this floating box when it appears, and you will observe up/down arrows. Click on these to get a menu of items to choose from, including Words. If you do not like the floating box location, press the command key and then click/drag/drop this box to the desired placement. Looks like this:
In this short article, I explain how you can find and view an accurate count of the number of words in Pages on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or on iCloud.com on your computer.
You may need to know how many words are in your documents. For example, School assignments usually carry length requirements, meaning a maximum word-limit is usually specified.
You can also view the number of characters, pages, paragraphs, and other information in your Pages document.
Pages is a word processor developed by Apple. Word count is defined as the number of words contained within the text.
You can create and edit Pages documents online on your Mac or PC by using Pages for iCloud.
1. Open or create a Pages document by going to icloud.com/pages. You will need to sign in. Please note that anyone can use Pages on iCloud.com. You will only need an Apple ID. You do not need to own an Apple device, you will only need an Apple ID.
2. Open your document and create a new one. Then click the View button.
3. And click Show Word Count.
4. A counter at the bottom of the page will appear. You can also hide this counter by going to View and Hide Word Count.
5. Click the arrow icon to see more statistics, including character with or without spaces, word, paragraph and page counts.
Pages on Mac word count
1. Open the document. Click View and then click Show Word Count to display the word counter.
2. Again you can click the arrow icon to view more statistics.
Pages on iPad word count
1. Open Pages and open your document or create a new document.
2. Tap the View icon.
3. And then turn on Word Count.
4. The counter will be displayed. If you want to see more statistics, tap the counter.
Pages on iPhone word count
1. Open the document on your iPhone. Tap the more (…) three-dot icon.
2. More options window will be displayed. Turn on Word Count. Then tap Done.
3. The counter will appear at the bottom of your screen. If you tap it, you can see more statistics.
Other details
- If you select some text, the word counter will show word count and other statistics for the selected part. If you do not select anything, Pages will count all text.
- The counter will show at the bottom of the screen. You can move it anywhere by dragging it.
See also:
- Pages: Can’t Open Document, Fix
- Unable to Open Office Files on Mac, How to Fix
Dr. Serhat Kurt worked as a Senior Technology Director. He holds a doctoral degree (or doctorate) from the University of Illinois at Urbana / Champaign and a master’s degree from Purdue University. Here is his LinkedIn profile. Email Serhat Kurt.