Sentence Counter
Count sentences in any paragraph or article draft.
Written by Anil Gautam · Updated
How does the sentence counter find the end of a sentence?
A sentence is a stretch of text ending in one or more full stops, question marks or exclamation marks, and any text after the last mark counts as one more. Runs of marks count once, so an ellipsis closes a single sentence: "Wait... what? Really?" counts 3. Text without end punctuation, such as a heading, counts as 1, stretches made only of spaces are ignored, and the result appears in the output box as, for example, "3 sentences".
Line breaks do not end sentences. A shopping list of Milk, Eggs and Bread on three lines with no punctuation counts as 1, because nothing marks an ending. Word Counter treats every line break as a boundary and counts the same list as 3, which suits lists, headings and bullet points. For prose copied from a PDF, where lines break in mid-sentence, this tool gives the truer figure, since it ignores those breaks.
Why is my sentence count higher than expected?
Every full stop ends a sentence, including the ones inside abbreviations, decimals and web addresses. "Dr. Rao met Mr. Shah at 5 p.m. on Monday." is one sentence, yet it counts 5, as Dr., Mr., p. and m. each close a sentence before the real ending. "The price rose 2.5 percent this year." counts 2, and so does "Visit example.com today." Numbered headings add to the total as well, since "1. Introduction" counts 2.
For an accurate total on text full of abbreviations or figures, subtract the false breaks by hand, or clean a copy first: Find and Replace can turn Dr. into Dr and p.m. into pm before you paste the copy here.
Which punctuation marks does it ignore?
Only those three Latin marks end a sentence. The Devanagari danda (।) used in Hindi and the ideographic full stop (。) used in Chinese and Japanese are ignored, so a Hindi paragraph of three sentences that each end in । counts as 1. Colons and semicolons never end a sentence either.
Once the count is right, the average sentence length is the word total from Word Counter divided by the sentence count: a 180-word draft with 12 sentences averages 15 words per sentence. Counting happens in your browser and updates with every keystroke.