How to Count Words in Google Docs, Word and Pages
3 min read
Short answer
Google Docs
Shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + C on Windows, ⌘ + Shift + C on Mac.
Menu: Tools → Word count.
To keep it on screen while you write, open the dialog and tick “Display word count while typing”. The counter then sits in the bottom-left corner and updates live — worth turning on for anything with a limit.
To count part of a document, select the text first and the dialog reports the selection alongside the document total.
Microsoft Word
The word count is always in the status bar at the bottom of the window. Click it to open the full dialog with characters, paragraphs and lines.
Shortcut: Ctrl + Shift + G on Windows, ⌘ + Shift + G on Mac.
Menu: Review → Word Count.
Two settings matter for academic work. In the dialog, “Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes” changes the total — and whether your institution counts footnotes is a question worth answering before you submit. If the status bar is missing the count entirely, right-click the status bar and tick Word Count.
Apple Pages
Menu: View → Show Word Count.
The count appears at the bottom of the page. Click it to switch between words, characters with spaces, characters without spaces, paragraphs and pages. Selecting text shows the selection’s count instead.
Any browser
Paste into our word counter and the count appears immediately, along with characters, sentences, paragraphs, reading time and reading level. Nothing is uploaded — the counting runs in your browser — which matters if the text is a draft you would rather not put into a website.
It is also the fastest way to count part of something: paste the paragraph or the chapter on its own and read the number.
Why the three sometimes disagree
Small differences between tools are normal and expected. They come from a handful of decisions each tool makes:
- Hyphenated words. “State-of-the-art” is one word in Word, Google Docs and here. Some tools split it into four.
- Numbers. “2,000” is one word. A tool that splits on punctuation would make it two.
- Footnotes, headers, text boxes and captions. Word can include or exclude these; a web tool never sees them.
- Text inside images. Counted by nothing.
- In-text citations. “(Smith, 2019)” counts as three words in Word, Google Docs and here.
For ordinary prose the totals normally match exactly. If your teacher or editor checks in Word, treat a difference of a few words as normal — and if a hard limit is close, check it in the software they will use.
Counting what your institution counts
Before worrying about the number, settle what is being counted. Most briefs exclude the reference list and the title page. Footnotes, appendices, tables and block quotations vary, and in a quotation-heavy essay that answer can be worth 200 words either way.
Once you know the total you need, the words to pages calculator converts it if the brief was set in pages, and the writing workspace tracks a word goal with a progress bar as you type.
Frequently asked questions
How do I count words on my phone? The Google Docs and Word mobile apps both have a word count in their menus. Or open the word counter in a mobile browser and paste.
Can I count words in a PDF? Not directly. Copy the text out and paste it into a counter — then run it through the text cleaner, because PDFs put a line break at the end of every visual line and that breaks the paragraph count.
How do I count characters rather than words? All three applications show characters in the same dialog. For platform limits — a tweet, a meta description, a UCAS statement — the character counter checks your text against each limit at once.