PDF Word Count

How do I count the words in a PDF?

Press Choose a PDF. The tool reads the text and shows the totals right away: words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, paragraphs and the time to read it. Open Words on each page to see every page's count, and press Download counts to save them all as a CSV file for a spreadsheet.

1. Press Choose a PDF.
2. Read the totals; tick or untick Leave out running headers and page numbers.
3. Open Words on each page for page-by-page counts.
4. Press Download counts (CSV) to keep them.

Is the PDF word count accurate?

For text PDFs, yes. We counted an 18-page report two ways: Microsoft Word counted the original document, and this tool counted the PDF Word exported from it. Both found 10,273 words and 54,290 characters without spaces. Characters with spaces differ slightly, because Word also counts the end of each paragraph.

A word is counted the way word processors count: characters between spaces that include a letter or digit, so "well-known" and "3.5" are one word each. In Chinese, Japanese and Korean text, each character counts as a word, as in Word.

How long does it take to read a PDF?

At 238 words a minute, the average adult silent reading rate for non-fiction, a 5,000-word report takes about 22 minutes to read. Reading aloud averages 183 words a minute, so the same report takes about 28 minutes to present. The tool works out both times from your PDF's word count.

Both rates come from Marc Brysbaert's 2019 review of 190 reading studies with 18,573 readers, listed below.

Why does my PDF show zero words?

The PDF is most likely a scan: each page is a picture of text, with no letters a program can read. Run it through OCR PDF, which recognizes the words and adds them as a hidden text layer, then count again. Some PDFs also hide their letters behind custom codes; the tool warns when the text it found looks garbled.

Make a scan countable with OCR PDF, or pull the text out with PDF to Text.