There are no firm rules: for example, the boundary between a novella and a novel is arbitrary and a literary work may be difficult to categorise. However, novels can vary tremendously in length Smiley lists novels as typically being between 100,000 and 175,000 words, while National Novel Writing Month requires its novels to be at least 50,000 words. Novelist Jane Smiley suggests that length is an important quality of the novel.
The exact number of words often is not a strict requirement, thus the variation is acceptable. There are a wide variety of word counting tools available online.ĭifferent word counting programs may give varying results, depending on the text segmentation rule details. Unix-like systems include a program, wc, specifically for word counting. Most word processors can also count words. Modern web browsers support word counting via extensions, via a JavaScript bookmarklet, or a script that is hosted in a website.
How to count words in a document software#
These "rules" have fallen by the wayside in the word processing era the "word count" feature of such software (which follows the text segmentation rules mentioned earlier) is now the standard arbiter, because it is largely consistent (across documents and applications) and because it is fast, effortless, and costless (already included with the application).Īs for which sections of a document "count" toward the total (such as footnotes, endnotes, abstracts, reference lists and bibliographies, tables, figure captions, hidden text), the person in charge (teacher, client) can define their choice, and users (students, workers) can simply select (or exclude) the elements accordingly, and watch the word count automatically update.
To save the time and effort of counting word-by-word, often a rule of thumb for the average number of words per line was used, such as 10 words per line. Hyphenated permanent compounds such as "follow-up" (noun) or "long-term" (adjective) were counted as one word. Most importantly, many students were drilled on the rule that "certain words don't count", usually articles (namely, "a", "an", "the"), but sometimes also others, such as conjunctions (for example, "and", "or", "but") and some prepositions (usually "to", "of").
However, during the era when school assignments were done in handwriting or with typewriters, the rules for these definitions often differed from today's consensus. But the behavior of most major word processing applications is broadly similar. Different word counting programs may give varying results, depending on the text segmentation rule details, and on whether words outside the main text (such as footnotes, endnotes, or hidden text) are counted. The first trait of that definition is that a space (any of various whitespace characters, such as a "regular" word space, an em space, or a tab character) is a word divider. The consensus is to accept the text segmentation rules generally found in most word processing software (including how word boundaries are determined, which depends on how word dividers are defined).
However, especially since the advent of widespread word processing, there is a broad consensus on these operational definitions (and hence the bottom-line integer result).
How to count words in a document how to#
Variations in the operational definitions of how to count the words can occur (namely, what "counts as" a word, and which words "don't count" toward the total). ( July 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources.
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