Paste your text below to count sentences instantly. You also get words, characters, paragraphs, and reading time, and nothing you paste leaves your browser.
Counting happens in your browser, so nothing you paste is sent to our servers. Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average for silent reading of English prose.
- A sentence ends at a period, question mark, or exclamation point followed by a space or the end of a line. Every line also counts as at least one sentence, so headings and list items are counted.
- Common abbreviations (Dr., Mrs., Jan., etc.), dotted ones like e.g. and Ph.D., single-letter initials, and periods inside numbers, file names, and domains (3.5, 6.8.1, wp-config.php) do not end a sentence.
- It gets ordinary prose right. The remaining misses are rare: a capitalized word after U.S., abbreviations like etc. at the very end of a sentence, and hard line breaks mid-sentence. The edge-case table below shows exactly where.
- Counting runs in your browser. Your text is never uploaded or stored.
- Reading time uses 238 words per minute, the average silent reading rate for English non-fiction (Brysbaert, 2019).
Under the tool you’ll find the exact rules it uses to decide where a sentence ends, a table of tricky inputs with the real results, and the sentence and paragraph targets that style guides actually publish.
How This Counter Decides What a Sentence Is
Counting words is easy: split on whitespace. Counting sentences is where tools disagree, because a period does not always end a sentence. Here is exactly what this one does, read straight from its JavaScript, so you can judge whether the number is right for your text.
- A sentence ends at a period, question mark, or exclamation point that is followed by a space or the end of the line. A closing quote or bracket can sit in between, so
He said "stop." Then he left.counts as two. - Stacked punctuation such as
?!or!!!counts as one ending, not several. - A period inside a word or number is ignored, so decimals and versions (
3.5,6.8.1), file names (wp-config.php), and domains (smartwp.com) never split a sentence. - A built-in abbreviation list stops the split after titles (Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., Prof., Sr., Jr., St.), months and weekdays (Jan., Mon.), and short forms like vs., etc., approx., dept., fig., no., vol., inc., ltd., co., and corp. Any single letter followed by a period is treated as an initial, which covers
J. Smith. - Dotted abbreviations such as
Ph.D.,p.m., andU.S.end a sentence only when the next word starts with a capital letter, soat 3 p.m. on Fridaystays one sentence andat 3 p.m. They left.becomes two.e.g.andi.e.never end a sentence. - Three or more periods, or the single ellipsis character (…), end a sentence only when the next word starts with a capital letter or the line ends.
Wait... what?is one sentence;I don't know... Maybe later.is two. - Every line counts as at least one sentence, even with no punctuation. Headings and list items get counted instead of being merged into the sentence before them.
That last rule has a trade-off. If your text has hard line breaks in the middle of sentences, common when you copy from a PDF or an email, each broken line is counted separately. Paste into a plain text editor and rejoin the lines first if you need an exact number.
Edge Cases: What the Counter Actually Returns
Rules are easier to trust when you can see them in action. Every row below is the real output of the counter for that exact string, including the cases it gets wrong.
| Text you paste | Sentences | Correct? | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
Dr. Smith went home. | 1 | Yes | Dr is on the abbreviation list |
Ms. Jones met Mr. Lee on Jan. 5 at 3 p.m. They talked. | 2 | Yes | Titles, a month, and p.m. are all handled |
It cost 3.5 dollars. | 1 | Yes | A period between two digits is a decimal |
Really?! No way. | 2 | Yes | Runs like ?! or !!! count as one ending |
He said "stop." Then he left. | 2 | Yes | A closing quote or bracket after the period is allowed |
(See the docs.) Then continue. | 2 | Yes | Same rule for a closing parenthesis |
Wait... what? | 1 | Yes | Ellipsis followed by a lowercase word is a pause |
I don't know... Maybe later. | 2 | Yes | Ellipsis followed by a capital starts a new sentence |
A heading [line break] The body starts here. It has two sentences. | 3 | Yes | The unpunctuated heading line counts as one |
Wait… What? | 2 | Yes | The single ellipsis character (…) works like three periods |
Wait...what? | 2 | No | With no space after the ellipsis, the text before it is counted as a fragment |
This sentence wraps [line break] onto a second line. | 2 | No | A hard line break always starts a new sentence |
He asked, "Why?" and left. | 2 | No | A question mark inside a mid-sentence quote reads as an ending |
Bring apples, pears, etc. Then we left. | 1 | No | etc. is treated as an abbreviation even when it ends the sentence |
The answer is no. We left. | 1 | No | "no." is read as the abbreviation No. (number) |
I got an A. Then I celebrated. | 1 | No | Any single letter plus a period is treated as an initial |
The U.S. Army is large. | 2 | No | A capital after a dotted abbreviation reads as a new sentence |
Fruit, e.g. apples, is good. | 1 | Yes | e.g. and i.e. never end a sentence |
Prof. Lee, Ph.D. teaches here. | 1 | Yes | Dotted abbreviation followed by a lowercase word |
We met at 3 p.m. on Friday. | 1 | Yes | Same rule for p.m. and a.m. |
WordPress 6.8.1 is out. Update today. | 2 | Yes | Periods inside a version number are ignored |
Edit wp-config.php to fix it. | 1 | Yes | Periods inside a file name are ignored |
Visit smartwp.com. It is free. | 2 | Yes | The dot inside the domain is ignored; the final period still ends the sentence |
For normal prose and most technical text the count is accurate. The misses that remain are a capitalized word right after U.S. or a similar dotted abbreviation, a short abbreviation like etc. or a single letter at the very end of a sentence, a question mark inside a mid-sentence quote, an ellipsis with no space after it, and hard line breaks. If your text has a lot of those, spot-check the sentences around them.
Why Sentence Count Is Worth Watching
Word count tells you how long a piece is. Sentence count tells you how it reads. Divide words by sentences and you get average sentence length, the quickest readability number you can calculate from this tool.
You don’t have to invent a target. Several style guides publish one:
| Source | Guideline | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Yoast SEO | Flags your text when more than 25% of sentences are over 20 words (English default) | Sentence length |
| GOV.UK style guidance | Try to split up sentences over 25 words; no more than 5 sentences per paragraph | Sentences and paragraphs |
| GOV.UK content team | Cites Ann Wylie’s research: at an average of 14 words, readers understand over 90%; at 43 words, under 10% | Average sentence length |
| Yoast SEO | Paragraphs up to 150 words score green; over 200 score red | Paragraph length |
Read those as ceilings, not goals. An average in the mid-teens sits comfortably under all of them. Variation matters too: prose where every sentence is a similar length reads flat, even when the average looks fine. Yoast says as much in its own guidance, noting that a complex 18-word sentence can be harder to read than a simple 22-word one.
Sentence counts also come up for practical reasons: assignments set in sentences rather than words, summaries capped at a fixed number of sentences, and short-form copy where you are working to a hard limit.
How Many Words Are in a Sentence?
There is no grammatical minimum or maximum. Go. is a complete sentence. What you can control is your average, and the guidelines above put the useful upper limit somewhere between 20 and 25 words.
If you have been asked for a set number of sentences and want a rough word budget, multiply by your average sentence length:
| Sentences | At 15 words each | At 20 words each |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | 45 | 60 |
| 5 | 75 | 100 |
| 10 | 150 | 200 |
| 15 | 225 | 300 |
| 20 | 300 | 400 |
How Many Sentences Should a Paragraph Have?
For web writing, fewer than you would use in print. GOV.UK’s guidance caps paragraphs at 5 sentences, and its content team has written that 3 to 6 sentences works best, with one thought per paragraph. Yoast measures paragraphs in words instead and starts warning past 150.
On a phone, even a 5-sentence paragraph can fill the screen, which is why one and two sentence paragraphs are normal online. To see your own ratio, divide the sentence count by the paragraph count. The counter starts a new paragraph at each blank line, so a single line break adds a sentence but not a paragraph.
Counting Words and Sentences in WordPress
If you are writing in WordPress rather than pasting text here, the block editor has counts built in. Our guide to WordPress word count shows where to find them in the block and classic editors, how to get a site-wide total across every post, and how to display the count on the front end.
Two differences are worth knowing. WordPress does not count sentences at all, only words, characters, headings, and paragraphs. And its reading time is based on 189 words per minute rather than the 238 used here, so WordPress will show a longer estimate for the same text.
Need to turn a sentence into a URL slug or a CSS class name instead? The kebab-case converter handles that, and it runs in your browser the same way this counter does.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many sentences is this?
Paste the text into the box at the top of this page and the sentence count updates as you type. If the number looks off by one or two, check the edge-case table above: line breaks inside sentences and abbreviations like etc. at the end of a sentence are the usual causes.
How many words should a sentence have?
There is no fixed rule, but published guidelines put the ceiling at 20 to 25 words. Yoast flags text when more than a quarter of its sentences go over 20 words, and GOV.UK asks writers to split anything over 25. A mix of short and longer sentences reads better than any single length.
How many sentences is a paragraph?
For the web, usually 1 to 5. GOV.UK sets a maximum of 5 sentences per paragraph. Print writing often runs longer, but on a phone screen shorter paragraphs are much easier to scan.
Why does my count differ from another tool?
Each tool decides differently how to treat abbreviations, decimals, ellipses, and unpunctuated lines. A counter that splits on every period reads Dr. Smith arrived. as two sentences. The rules and test results above show exactly how this one behaves, so you can see where a difference comes from.
Does the counter store the text I paste?
No. All of the counting happens in your browser with JavaScript, and the script makes no network requests. Your text is never sent to a server, logged, or stored.
How is reading time calculated?
Words divided by 238 words per minute, the average silent reading rate for English non-fiction in Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Most adults fall between 175 and 300 words per minute, so treat it as an estimate.
This counter is one of our free tools, and none of them ask for an email address.
