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. This counter also treats each line as at least one sentence, so headings and list items are counted rather than merged.
- Abbreviations (Dr., Mrs., Jan.) and decimals (3.14) are excluded, which is where most simple counters go wrong and inflate the total.
- Counting runs in your browser, so your text is never uploaded or stored anywhere.
- Reading time assumes 238 words per minute, the average for silent reading of English prose.
- For readability, aim for a mix of sentence lengths and an average of roughly 15 to 20 words.
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, so you can judge whether the number is right for your text.
The basic rule is that a sentence ends at a period, question mark, or exclamation point, including when a closing quote or bracket follows it. So He said “stop.” Then he left. counts as two.
On top of that, three adjustments handle the cases that trip up simpler counters. Abbreviations are recognized, so Dr. Smith went home. is one sentence rather than two. Decimals are protected, so It cost 3.14 dollars. is one sentence and not two. And an ellipsis only ends a sentence when what follows actually starts a new one, so Wait… what? counts once, while I don’t know… Maybe later. counts twice.
Finally, every line counts as at least one sentence even without punctuation. That way a heading or a bulleted list is counted rather than silently merged into the sentence before it. The trade-off is that if your text has hard line breaks in the middle of sentences, which is unusual in pasted prose, those lines will be counted separately.
Why Sentence Count Is Worth Watching
Word count tells you how long a piece is. Sentence count tells you how it reads. Dividing words by sentences gives you average sentence length, which is the single most useful readability number you can get in a few seconds.
As a rough guide, an average around 15 to 20 words reads comfortably for most audiences. Drifting past 25 usually means sentences are doing too much at once and need splitting. Well under 10 can read as choppy, though short sentences are a good deliberate tool for emphasis.
The average matters less than the variation, though. Prose where every sentence is a similar length reads flat no matter what that length is. Mixing long and short is what gives writing rhythm, and it is also one of the more reliable tells that separates human writing from generated text.
Sentence counts also come up for practical reasons: assignments specified in sentences rather than words, summaries capped at a set number of sentences, meta descriptions, and social posts where you are working to a hard limit.
Counting Words and Sentences in WordPress
If you are writing in WordPress rather than pasting text here, the block editor has counts built in. Click the document overview icon at the top left and open the Outline tab for word count, character count, headings, paragraphs, and reading time in one panel. Our guide to WordPress word count covers that, plus how to get a site-wide total across every post and how to display the count on the front end of your site.
Worth knowing: WordPress does not count sentences at all, only words, characters, headings, and paragraphs. If sentence count matters to your editing process, this tool fills that gap.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many sentences is a paragraph?
There is no fixed rule, but three to five sentences is a common range for print. Online, shorter is usually better, and one or two sentence paragraphs are completely normal on the web because they are easier to scan on a phone.
Does the counter store the text I paste?
No. All of the counting happens in your browser with JavaScript. Your text is never sent to a server, logged, or stored, which matters if you are checking something confidential or unpublished.
Why does my count differ from another tool?
Almost always because of how each tool handles abbreviations, decimals, ellipses, and unpunctuated lines. A counter that splits naively on every period will read Dr. Smith arrived. as two sentences. The section above spells out the rules this one uses so you can see where a difference comes from.
How is reading time calculated?
Words divided by 238 words per minute, which is the average for silent reading of English prose in the research literature. Treat it as an estimate: technical material reads slower and light material faster. WordPress uses a slightly more optimistic figure for its own estimate, which is why the two can differ on the same text.
Other free tools we have built: a case converter for kebab-case, camelCase, and snake_case, a WordPress version checker, and an uptime checker for seeing whether a site is down for everyone or just you.
