PDF Word Counter: Count Words, Characters and Pages

What gets counted

The counter reads the selectable text in the PDF: the same text you can highlight and copy in a PDF viewer. Every piece of selectable text on every page is included. A word is anything separated by a space or line break, so "well-known" counts as one word and "2026" counts as one word.

Because everything on the page is included, the total can be higher than the count your word processor showed before you exported the file. These parts are counted too:

• Running headers and footers, including page numbers, which repeat on every page
• Footnotes, endnotes, and the reference list or bibliography
• Text inside tables, charts, and captions
• The title page, table of contents, and any appendices

Why the count can differ from Word or Google Docs

Word processors usually leave footnotes, text boxes, and headers out of their main count. A PDF has no such distinction: the text is just text on a page. On a 20-page paper with a header and page number on every page, that alone can add 60 to 100 words.

Hyphenation is the other common cause. When a long word is split across two lines, such as "docu-" at the end of one line and "ment" on the next, the PDF stores two separate pieces and they are counted as two words. Justified academic text with automatic hyphenation can gain a dozen words this way.

If you still have the original file, use its built-in count for submission, because that is usually the figure your university or publisher means. Use this tool when you only have the PDF, or when you want to check a document someone else sent you.

Counting only part of a document

Many universities and journals count the main text only, excluding the abstract, references, and appendices. The quickest way to get that figure is to make a copy of the PDF with only the pages you need.

Use Remove PDF Pages to delete the title page, reference list, and appendices, then count the shorter file here. To count a single chapter, use Split PDF with a page range such as 12-30 to save just those pages, then count that file.

Scanned PDFs show zero words

A scanned document is a set of photographs of paper. There is no selectable text, so there is nothing to count. You can check by trying to highlight a sentence in your PDF viewer: if you can only draw a box over the page, it is a scan.

To get text out of a scan, convert the pages to images with PDF to JPG, then run each image through Image to Text. Paste the result into any text editor to see its word count. Recognition is very good on clean, typed pages and weaker on handwriting or faint photocopies.

Other ways to count words in a PDF

PDF viewers, including Preview on Mac and the free version of Acrobat Reader, do not have a word count feature. These are the usual alternatives:

• Word on desktop can open a PDF and convert it into an editable document. The status bar then shows the word count. Complex layouts may convert imperfectly.
• Google Docs can open a PDF from Google Drive (right-click, then Open with Google Docs). Choose Tools, then Word count. This requires uploading the file to your Google account.
• Copy all the text from the PDF (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A, then copy) and paste it into a word processor. This works for short documents but often breaks on columns and tables.

Turning the count into pages and reading time

Word limits are sometimes given in pages instead. As a rough guide, a page of 12-point text holds about 500 words single-spaced and about 250 words double-spaced. For reading time, most adults read 200 to 250 words per minute, so a 5,000-word report takes 20 to 25 minutes to read. Spoken presentations run slower, at around 130 to 150 words per minute.