Sentence counter
Paste or type text and the sentence, word and character counts update as you go, with nothing to click.
Start typing or paste text to see the counts.
How the sentence counter splits text into sentences
Counting runs in two passes: split, then stitch back. The split pass treats every line break as a sentence boundary, then looks inside each line for sentence-ending punctuation — a period, question mark or exclamation mark, an ellipsis (… or ...), and the CJK marks 。！？. Where the browser supports it, that pass uses Intl.Segmenter, the sentence-boundary rules built into the JavaScript engine; older browsers get a fallback regex that approximates this and knows to leave a decimal point like 3.14 alone. The stitch pass repairs what punctuation alone gets wrong. It carries a list of about sixty-five common English abbreviations and honorifics (Dr., Mr., e.g., i.e., a.m., p.m., the month and weekday abbreviations) and rejoins a fragment that ends in one of them to what follows, and it rejoins any fragment that starts with a lowercase letter to the sentence before it, which keeps "Really?" she asked. as one sentence. There is no language model in either pass. Words are split on whitespace, the same way the reading time calculator counts them. Characters are counted by Unicode code point, meaning a composite emoji might count as multiple characters. Paragraphs are blocks separated by a blank line; a single line break stays inside its paragraph but still ends a sentence, which is why a bullet list with no punctuation counts one sentence per line. Both passes run in this tab, and the text never leaves it.
What this sentence counter gets wrong
- The abbreviation list has about sixty-five English entries. A title or field-specific abbreviation that is missing from it will end a sentence early, and abbreviations in other languages are not covered at all.
- Words are split on whitespace, which is right for English and wrong for Chinese, Japanese and other scripts that do not put spaces between words. For those, the word count and the average words per sentence are meaningless.
- Every line break ends a sentence, so a heading or a bullet point counts as one sentence even without punctuation. A paragraph that was hard-wrapped in the middle of a sentence is over-counted for the same reason.
- The counter reports how many sentences your punctuation and line breaks produced. It has no opinion on grammar, run-ons, or whether a 60-word sentence should have been two.
Questions about the sentence counter
Is my text sent anywhere?
No. Every count on this page is computed in your browser as you type. Nothing is uploaded, and there is no server involved in the calculation.
How does it handle abbreviations like "Dr." or "e.g."?
The split pass on its own would end a sentence at "Dr.", "e.g." or "U.S.", because sentence-boundary rules only see punctuation. The stitch pass described above rejoins those using its list of about sixty-five common English abbreviations, and rejoins any fragment that starts with a lowercase letter to the sentence before it. An abbreviation missing from the list can still cause a split; see the limits above.
How are paragraphs counted?
A paragraph is a block of text separated from the next by a blank line, meaning two or more consecutive line breaks. A single line break inside a block does not start a new paragraph, and one trailing newline at the end of your text does not add an empty paragraph.
How is this different from a word counter, and why does average words per sentence matter?
A word counter, like the one inside the words per minute calculator on this site, gives you a total. This page divides that total by sentence, so you also see the average words per sentence and the longest sentence, the two numbers that expose a piece built from one long sentence after another.
