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PDF word count

Count the words, characters and pages in a PDF, with an estimated reading time. Your file is read in your browser, never uploaded.

Common questions

  • A word is a run of letters or digits, and an apostrophe or hyphen inside it keeps it as one word, so “don’t” and “well-known” each count once. Non-Latin scripts are counted properly rather than being split at every accented character.

How the count works

The tool reads the text layer of each page and counts words the way a word processor does: a run of letters or digits, with an apostrophe or hyphen inside a word keeping it as one. Other scripts, such as Cyrillic or accented Latin, are counted properly.

What is included

Everything in the text layer — headers, footers, page numbers and footnotes as well as body text. If you need the body only, expect your figure to be a little lower than the one shown here.

Scanned documents

A scan is a picture of text, so it has no text layer and the count will be zero. The tool says so rather than reporting a misleading number; the text would need OCR first.