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Sentence Counter

Count the sentences in any text as you type, along with words, paragraphs, average sentence length, your shortest and longest sentences and how sentence lengths are spread. Everything runs in your browser.

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0sentences

Paste some text to count its sentences.

Words
0
Characters
0
Paragraphs
0
Avg. words per sentence
0.0
Shortest sentence
–
Longest sentence
–

Sentence length

  • Short (1–10 words)0
  • Medium (11–20 words)0
  • Long (21–30 words)0
  • Very long (31+ words)0

Sentences over 20 words: 0%

These ranges are practical guides used by WriterFlowLab, not grammar rules. A long sentence can be perfectly clear.

Show each sentence with its word count

Check how the text was split. Unusual formatting can change the count.

    Sentences end at a full stop, question mark, exclamation mark or ellipsis followed by a new sentence, and at line breaks such as headings and list items. Decimals, common abbreviations, initials and web addresses are not treated as sentence endings. Detection is heuristic, so unusual formatting may affect the count.

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    How sentences are counted

    • Sentence endings: a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by the start of a new sentence. An ellipsis (... or …) ends a sentence only when the next word starts with a capital letter.
    • Not sentence endings: decimals such as 2.5, common abbreviations such as "Dr.", "Mr.", "e.g.", "i.e." and "vs.", initials such as "J. K.", acronyms such as "U.S.", and full stops inside web addresses and email addresses.
    • Quotations: a question or exclamation inside quotation marks followed by a lower-case word, as in “Ready?” she asked, stays one sentence.
    • Lines: headings and list items on their own line count as separate sentences even without end punctuation. A line that wraps mid-sentence and continues in lower case is joined to the line before. List numbers such as "1." at the start of a line are not counted as words.

    Sentence detection is heuristic. It handles the common cases above, but unusual formatting, missing punctuation or text pasted with broken line breaks can change the count. Open "Show each sentence" under the tool to see exactly how your text was split.

    Sentence length ranges

    • Short: 1 to 10 words
    • Medium: 11 to 20 words
    • Long: 21 to 30 words
    • Very long: 31 words or more

    These are practical ranges WriterFlowLab uses for spotting sentences worth a second look, not grammar rules. A clear long sentence is fine, and a run of very short ones can feel choppy. For comparison, GOV.UK has explained why 25 words is its sentence limit. A healthy mix of lengths usually reads better than any single target. Our guide to how long a sentence should be covers this in more detail.

    What the other numbers mean

    • Words: groups of characters separated by spaces that contain a letter or number.
    • Characters: every character including spaces and line breaks, counted as Unicode characters.
    • Paragraphs: blocks of text separated by a line break or a blank line. See how many sentences a paragraph should have.
    • Average words per sentence: total words divided by total sentences. It is a key input into readability scores, which you can check with the readability score checker.
    • Shortest and longest sentence: the sentences with the fewest and most words, shown in full so you can find them in your text.

    Limitations

    • No automatic sentence counter is 100% accurate. Rare abbreviations, missing spaces after full stops and creative punctuation can be miscounted.
    • An abbreviation such as "etc." or "Inc." at the end of a sentence is treated as a sentence ending only when the next word starts with a capital letter.
    • Text without punctuation, such as notes or song lyrics, is split only at line breaks.
    • The rules are designed for English. Other languages that use the same punctuation usually work, but languages with different sentence punctuation may not be counted correctly.

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    • Your text is processed locally in your browser by a script on this page.
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