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Word Count for PDF / DOCX

Count words and characters in PDF, DOCX, and text files directly in your browser.

Browser-based Instant
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About the tool

What it does and what to expect

Count words inside common documents

Students, editors, translators, and legal teams use document word counts to estimate reading, editing, or translation workload. The tool extracts text from PDF, DOCX, TXT, and Markdown files without requiring manual copy and paste.

A practical example

Upload a 12-page DOCX manuscript to see its word total, character count, estimated reading time, and file size. A scanned PDF made only of page images may return zero because it needs optical character recognition rather than text extraction.

How it works

A simple, local workflow

  1. 1Select or drop a PDF, DOCX, TXT, or Markdown document.
  2. 2PDF.js extracts embedded PDF text, Mammoth reads DOCX text, and plain-text formats are read directly.
  3. 3The extracted content is analyzed for words, characters, estimated reading time, and source file size.

FAQs

Common questions

Can this count words in a scanned PDF?

Not unless the PDF already contains an OCR text layer. Image-only pages require a separate OCR process.

Does DOCX word count exactly match Microsoft Word?

It can differ slightly because applications handle fields, footnotes, hyphenation, headers, and embedded objects differently.

Are tables included in the count?

Text that the PDF or DOCX extractor can read from tables is generally included.

What file types are supported?

The tool supports PDF, DOCX, plain text, and Markdown files. Legacy .doc files are not supported.

Comments & feedback

Help make this tool better

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