PDF Word Counter
Upload a PDF to count its words, characters, sentences, and paragraphs — broken down per page. Everything runs in your browser; your file is never uploaded.
Drop a PDF here, or click to browse
Text must be selectable (scanned image PDFs are not supported)
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Words
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Characters (no spaces)
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Sentences
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Pages
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Characters (with spaces)
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Avg. words per page
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Est. reading time
Word counts per page
| Page | Words | Characters | Sentences |
|---|
How PDF Word Counting Works
PDFs store text as a stream of character positioning commands rather than plain prose. This tool uses pdf.js to read each page's text content layer and reconstruct the text, then applies standard word-counting rules:
- Words — sequences of characters separated by whitespace
- Characters (no spaces) — all non-whitespace characters
- Sentences — text segments ending with
.,!, or? - Reading time — based on the average adult reading speed of 238 words per minute
Limitations of PDF Text Extraction
Not all PDFs contain extractable text. Scanned documents (PDFs created by scanning paper) store pages as images with no text layer — those documents show zero words. To count words in a scanned PDF, you would first need to run optical character recognition (OCR) to convert the images to text.
Some PDFs use custom font encoding that can cause garbled text extraction. Complex layouts with multi-column text or text in unusual reading order may also yield unexpected results.
Word Count Guidelines
| Document Type | Typical Word Count |
|---|---|
| One A4 page (single-spaced) | ~500 words |
| One A4 page (double-spaced) | ~250 words |
| Short report (10 pages) | ~4,000–5,000 words |
| Academic dissertation | 10,000–80,000 words |
| Novel | 70,000–120,000 words |
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does my PDF show 0 words?
The PDF is likely a scanned document — the pages are stored as images with no text layer. OCR software is needed to extract text from scanned PDFs.
Does the word count include headers and footers?
Yes. The counter includes all text extracted from the page, including headers, footers, captions, footnotes, and any text in text boxes.
Can I count words in a password-protected PDF?
PDFs protected with a user password (required to open the file) cannot be processed. PDFs with an owner password only (restricting editing but not opening) usually work fine.
Why might the count differ from copying and pasting the text manually?
PDF text extraction reconstructs text from positioning data, which can differ slightly from what a viewer presents when you select and copy text. The counts should be very close for most well-formed PDFs.
