Sentence Counter
Count sentences with abbreviation-aware splitting and per-sentence length stats.
Written by Golam Rabbani, Founder & Lead Engineer
How to use this sentence counter
- Paste or type your text into the "Your text" field.
- Five stat cards update live — total sentences, total words, average words per sentence, shortest sentence, and longest sentence.
- Click "Show breakdown" to see every sentence numbered with its individual word count.
- Press Copy summary to copy the headline stats to your clipboard.
- Press Reset to clear and start over.
About this sentence counter
The sentence counter walks the text one character at a time and splits on `.`, `!`, or `?` followed by whitespace or end-of-text. Two safeguards prevent false positives. First, the bundled abbreviation list (Mr, Dr, Inc, e.g., i.e., a.m., p.m., U.S.A., months, weekdays, and ~60 more) keeps "Dr. Smith said hi." from being detected as two sentences. Second, periods between digits (like `3.14`) are kept inside the current sentence so decimal numbers don't inflate the count.
A concrete example. Paste:
`Dr. Smith arrived at 3:00 p.m. He had 3.14 reasons to be late! Was it raining? Maybe.`
The counter detects 4 sentences (not 8): `Dr. Smith arrived at 3:00 p.m.`, `He had 3.14 reasons to be late!`, `Was it raining?`, and `Maybe.`. Total words: 17. Average: 4.3 per sentence. Shortest: 1 word ("Maybe"). Longest: 7 words.
This is useful for hitting a target sentence count, smoothing variable sentence length in writing exercises, and rough readability checks (sentences over 25 words tend to feel dense). All processing runs in your browser.
FAQ
- How does it tell sentences from abbreviations?
- A bundled list of ~60 common abbreviations (Mr, Mrs, Dr, Prof, Inc, Ltd, e.g., i.e., a.m., p.m., months, weekdays, and more) is checked against the token immediately before each period. If the token matches, the period is kept inside the current sentence rather than treated as a terminator.
- Will decimal numbers like 3.14 inflate the count?
- No. When the character before and after a period are both digits, the period is treated as a decimal point and the sentence continues.
- What about ellipses ("...")?
- Runs of consecutive terminators (`...`, `!!!`, `?!`) are consumed as one terminator. The ellipsis ends one sentence; it does not create three.
- Can it handle multi-line input?
- Yes. All whitespace, including newlines, is normalized to single spaces before splitting, so line breaks inside a sentence do not artificially split it.
- What does the average word count metric tell me?
- It is the total word count divided by sentence count. Mainstream prose averages 15–20 words per sentence; academic writing can run 25–30. Aiming for 17 ± 5 generally reads well to non-specialist audiences.
- Is my text uploaded or stored?
- No. Everything runs in your browser. Your text is never sent to a server and is discarded when you close the tab.