How to View the Word Count in Microsoft Word (PC & Mac)

This tutorial shows how to view the word count in Microsoft Word, including the whole document and specific sections.

We will also open the Word Count dialog box to see the number of paragraphs, lines, and characters with and without spaces, as well as how to exclude text boxes, footnotes, and endnotes from the count.

Table of Contents

How to View the Word Count for the Whole Document
How to View the Word Count for Specific Sections
How to Open the Word Count Dialog Box

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The images below are from Word for Microsoft 365. These steps also apply to Word for Microsoft 365 for Mac (a.k.a., Word for Mac), Word 2024, Word 2021, Word 2019, Word 2016, Word 2013, and Word 2010. These steps don’t apply to Word for the web or Word for mobile.

How to View the Word Count for the Whole Document

The word count for the document appears at the bottom of the screen on the left side of the Status Bar.

Word count in the Status Bar in Word 365 — Figure 1. Status Bar word count

If the word count doesn’t appear in your Status Bar, right-click it and then select Word Count from the Customize Status Bar menu.

You can also add Character Count (with spaces) to your Status Bar from this menu.

Customize Status Bar menu in Word 365 — Figure 2. Customize Status Bar menu

How to View the Word Count for Specific Sections

To view the number of words in a specific sentence, paragraph, page, or section, select only that text.

To select multiple blocks of text in different locations in the document, press Ctrl (PC) or Command (Mac) as you make the selections. While pressing Ctrl or Command, the text between your selections shouldn’t be selected.

The word count in the Status bar will then update to say “[#] of [#] words.”

Selected word count in the Status Bar in Word 365 — Figure 3. Selected word count

Once you deselect the text, the count will return to the total for the entire document.

How to Open the Word Count Dialog Box

Word offers several ways to open the Word Count dialog box.

Select the word count in the Status Bar (see figure 1).
Select the Word Count button in the Review tab.
(PC only) Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + G.

Word 365 Review Tab Word Count Button — Figure 4. Word Count button

The Word Count dialog box shows the number of pages, words, characters with and without spaces, paragraphs, and lines in your document.

Important Note: The lines statistic in the Word Count dialog box represents the number of individual lines with letters or numbers in them, not the number of sentences. The number of lines in your document will be affected by your font size (i.e., the bigger the font, the more lines you will have.)

Uncheck “Include textboxes, footnotes and endnotes” if you want to exclude everything in those sections from the word count. The count should update immediately.