About the Sentence Counter
Counting sentences naively means counting full stops, and that answer is wrong the moment a title, an initial or a decimal number appears. Before splitting, this counter protects a list of around forty everyday abbreviations including Mr., Mrs., Dr., Prof., etc., Inc., Ltd., Fig. and the month names, along with any dotted initialism such as a.m. or U.S.A., and any full stop sitting between two digits. Ellipses are kept whole. Only after that does it break at a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark followed by whitespace, allowing a closing quote or bracket in between.
The report gives the sentence total, the word total, the average sentence length, and the position and size of the longest and shortest sentences. It also separates questions from exclamations, which is a quick health check on marketing copy that has drifted into shouting. A rough reading time at two hundred words per minute rounds out the summary.
Turn the breakdown on and every sentence is listed with its word count, so the one that runs to forty five words is easy to find and split. Turn abbreviation protection off if you are working with data where every full stop really is a boundary, such as a machine generated list. To measure blocks rather than sentences, Paragraph Counter reports the same detail one level up.
How to use
- Paste the passage you want to measure.
- Leave abbreviation protection on for normal prose.
- Read the summary, then use the list to find any sentence over roughly thirty words.
- Copy or download the report.
Common questions
- Does a decimal number split a sentence?
- No. A full stop between two digits is protected, so 3.14 and 99.9 stay inside their sentence.
- What about a sentence with no final punctuation?
- A trailing fragment still counts as one sentence, since it has letters in it and nothing follows.
- Which abbreviations are recognised?
- Around forty common ones such as Mr., Dr., Prof., etc., Inc., Ltd. and the month names, plus any dotted initialism like i.e. or U.K.
- Is a bullet list counted as sentences?
- Only where the bullets end in punctuation. Bullets without full stops merge into one sentence, which is worth knowing before reading the average.