Manuscript word counter

How the words are counted

A word is a run of letters or digits, in any alphabet. An apostrophe or a hyphen inside a word keeps it one word: don't, well-known and Ærø are one word each, and so is naïve. Words split at spaces, at em and en dashes and at slashes: yes—no, 1914–1918 and and/or are two words each. Numbers count, and a full stop, comma or colon between digits keeps a number whole: 3.5, 1,000 and 9:30 are one word each. A line of only *** is no word.

What is counted: the body text, headings included, so a chapter's count includes its own title. With tracked changes, the inserted text counts and the deleted text does not, as if every change were accepted. What is not: footnotes and endnotes, comments, headers and footers, and text boxes; the page says how many it left out. In Markdown, YAML front matter, HTML comments, footnote lines and link addresses are not counted either.

Why your word processor may say a few words more or less. Word processors mostly count whatever sits between two spaces. So yes—no typed without spaces is one word to them and two here; a dash or an ampersand standing alone between spaces can count as a word there and never does here; and e.g. is one word there and two here. Some include footnotes and text boxes in their total, or leave out deleted-but-tracked text differently. How far apart the two totals land depends on how often your prose has unspaced dashes, slashes and abbreviations; the chapter-to-chapter comparison is the same either way.

Chapters and scenes

Chapters start at your document's Heading 1 paragraphs (the default when there are any), Heading 2, the Title style, chapter lines (a paragraph that is just Chapter 12, CHAPTER TWELVE, Chapter 3: The Mill, Prologue, Epilogue or Part One; Part one of the plan failed. is not one), page breaks (in a .docx or .odt with no headings and no chapter lines, each hard page break starts a chapter, titled by the short line that opens the new page; the text before the first break is front matter if it is under 150 words, a title page, and chapter one if it is longer), or a marker you type, such as ## or CHAPTER: every paragraph that starts with it begins a chapter. In Markdown, # is Heading 1 and ## is Heading 2. Change the choice and the table is split again at once. Text before the first chapter (a title page, an epigraph) is its own Front matter row, left out of the longest, shortest and median.

Scenes are separated by a paragraph that is only ***, * * *, #, ~~~ or § (and --- in Markdown), and in a .txt file by two or more blank lines. A chapter with words has at least one scene. The average scene is the words in all the scenes divided by the number of scenes, chapter titles left out.

Reading time is the total words divided by a reading speed, 250 words a minute unless you change it. That speed is an assumption, a round figure often used for adults reading silently, not a measurement of your readers; type your own.

Take the example, The Tidewright's Ledger, an invented short manuscript: a title page, a prologue and three chapters, 661 words in all. Split by Heading 1, the front matter is 9 words, the prologue 107, and chapter two the longest at 200 words in 3 scenes; its one footnote is left out and listed as such.

Pages

How many pages? lays your text out line by line instead of dividing by a words-per-page figure: every paragraph is broken into lines word by word at the real width of each word in a real font, the lines are stacked into pages, and every chapter starts on a new page. The fonts are Liberation Serif and Liberation Mono, open fonts made for the same layout as Times New Roman and Courier New, loaded from this site the first time you open the panel, and measured by your browser.

As a manuscript (this page's own assumptions, stated so you can check them): US Letter or A4 with 1-inch margins, 12 pt, double-spaced as twice the font's own line height (27.6 pt lines in the Times-metric font, 27.2 pt in the Courier-metric one), which gives 23 lines on a Letter page and 25 on A4 in either font; a half-inch first-line indent, the running header inside the top margin, each chapter on a new page with its title a third of the way down and one blank line after it, and a scene break as one line.

As a printed book at 5×8, 5.25×8, 5.5×8.5 and 6×9 inches, or a size you type: 11 pt type on lines 1.3 times the type size, margins of 0.75 in at the top, bottom and inside and 0.5 in outside, all of which you can change, in Liberation Serif. Choose whether chapters start on any new page or on a right-hand page (a blank left-hand page is added where needed), and how many blank pages to allow for front matter such as the title page and copyright page. The pages of each chapter appear in the chapters table, beside its words, for the trim you pick.

I only have a word count: type the number and the chapters, and the panel fills the same layouts with this page's own sample story, The Tidewright's Ledger, repeated to that many words. That is an estimate from sample text, labelled as one: your own prose, with more or less dialogue and longer or shorter words, fills a different number of pages. For example, 80,000 words in 20 chapters of the sample fill 260 pages as a Letter manuscript in the Times-metric font, and 200 pages as a 6×9 book with the defaults above.

Why a typesetter's count will differ. A typesetter hyphenates long words, so lines hold more and the book gets shorter; keeps widows and orphans (a paragraph's last or first line alone at the top or bottom of a page) off the page edges, which adds the odd page; sets chapter openings, part pages and front matter their own way; and uses a book face whose letters are wider or narrower than Times. Treat the book figure as a close planning number, not the printer's final page count.

Exports

Save as spreadsheet (CSV) gives one row per chapter: chapter number, title, words, scenes and the running total, for Excel, LibreOffice or any sheet. Export chart saves the bar chart as a PNG or an SVG on light or dark paper, or prints one A4 or Letter sheet with the totals and every chapter's words, scenes, share and bar.

Format it for submission

When the counts look right, the manuscript format tool reads the same file the same way, chapters, scene breaks, italics and all, and gives it back as a .docx in standard manuscript format: double-spaced 12 pt type, the running header with your surname, a title page for a novel or the contact block for a short story, and the word count rounded the way the guide it follows says.

Log the total in the word count tracker

Log this total in my word count tracker lists the word count tracker projects saved in this browser, or starts a new one, and shows what logging would do before it does it: Your manuscript has 661 words; your last logged total was 480, so today adds 181. Confirm and today's entry is what typing 661 under the tracker's New total would store; an entry already logged today is replaced only after the confirm says what it held. A total below the project's logged total is refused with the reason (words you cut do not come off the days you wrote them), and one Undo puts the project back as it was. To send each chapter's count to the plot grid as well, open the file with Count from my manuscript on the tracker, in a project linked to the outline.

What it cannot do

• No old .doc files (the binary format before .docx), no .pages, no Scrivener .scriv projects, no PDF and no link to an online document: download or export the manuscript as .docx, .odt or .txt first, then open that file. A password-protected document cannot be read either.
• Opening .docx and .odt needs the browser's own unzipping (DecompressionStream with “deflate-raw”): Chrome and Edge 103 or newer, Firefox 113, Safari 16.4 on a Mac, iPhone or iPad, Opera 89 and Samsung Internet 20, as MDN's compatibility table lists them. An older browser can still count .md, .txt and pasted text.
• Text boxes, footnotes, endnotes, comments, headers and footers are not counted.
• Chapters come from headings, chapter lines, hard page breaks or your marker. A manuscript whose chapters are marked only by bold text, by blank lines or by section breaks shows as one row: add a marker line, or use Heading 1. A page break that is only a run of empty lines, or a .md or .txt file, has no page breaks to find.
• A .txt file with lines wrapped by hand still counts right, but a wrapped line that happens to start with Chapter 3. would start a chapter. A file that puts two blank lines between every paragraph turns every paragraph into a scene.
• Nothing is remembered: close or reload the page and the counts are gone, apart from a total you log in the word count tracker. Save the CSV to keep the chapters.
• Logging to the tracker sets today's total only, not past days, and a tracker page already open in another tab shows it after you reload that tab.
• One file at a time; a file over 200 MB is not opened.
• Page counts are a line-by-line layout in Liberation fonts, not your typesetter's: no hyphenation, no widow or orphan control, no running heads or page numbers taking lines, and paragraph styles from your file (spacing, centred lines, block quotes) are not kept, so every paragraph is set the same way. A count from a typed word count is an estimate from sample text. The first time the panel opens it downloads one font of about 390 KB (the Courier-metric one, about 320 KB, only if you choose it).

Private by design

No account and no upload. The file is read by this page in your browser, with the browser's own unzipping, and is never sent anywhere; nothing about it is saved on your device either, unless you log its total in the word count tracker, which keeps that one number.