Sentence Counter

The Sentence Counter tells you how many sentences, words and paragraphs your text contains, along with characters, characters without spaces and an estimated reading time. Paste your text and press Count sentences; the figures appear as cards under the result box.

How a sentence is detected

The counter looks for stretches of text that end in one or more of the three sentence-ending marks: . ? or !. Each stretch is one sentence. Several marks in a row, such as ?! or ..., still close only one sentence. This simple rule works well on ordinary prose but has predictable blind spots:

• Abbreviations: every full stop ends a "sentence", so p.m., Dr. and e.g. inflate the count.
• Decimals and web addresses: ₹2.5 lakh and example.com each add an extra break.
• No closing punctuation: a final sentence, a heading or a bullet point without a full stop is not counted at all. Hello world on its own counts as zero sentences.
• Hindi and Marathi: the danda (।) is not recognised as a sentence end, so Devanagari text without Latin full stops shows few or no sentences.

Worked example

Our school library will stay open until 7 p.m. during exam week. Students must carry their ID cards at all times, and bags are not allowed inside the reading hall.

Return borrowed books by 30 April. A fine of ₹5 per day applies after the due date!

The counter reports 47 words, 6 sentences and 2 paragraphs. A reader sees only four sentences; the extra two come from the full stops in "p.m.". For an accurate figure, write such abbreviations without dots (pm, Dr) before counting, or subtract them yourself.

Paragraphs and reading time

Paragraphs are blocks separated by at least one blank line. Text with single line breaks and no blank lines counts as one paragraph, however many lines it has. Reading time is words divided by 200, rounded, with a minimum of one minute, so the 47-word example shows 1 min.

Using sentence counts to improve readability

Divide words by sentences to get your average sentence length. With the corrected count above that is 47 ÷ 4, about 12 words per sentence, which is comfortable to read. Many plain-English guides suggest keeping the average around 15 to 20 words. The Flesch Reading Ease score builds on the same figure:

206.835 − 1.015 × (words ÷ sentences) − 84.6 × (syllables ÷ words)

Longer sentences lower the score, meaning harder text. SEO plugins such as Yoast also warn when more than a quarter of sentences exceed 20 words. If your average is high, look for sentences joined with "and", "which" or semicolons and split them.

Sentence counts also matter for school work that asks for "answer in 3 to 5 sentences", and for summaries with sentence limits. When the brief is a word limit instead, such as a 250-word UPSC answer, the Word Counter or Essay Word Counter is the page to keep open.