Count sentences live, with per-sentence word counts.
Every sentence with its word count — green up to 20 words, amber 21–30, red over 30 (worth splitting for readability).
A sentence counter tells you how many sentences a piece of text contains, and this one does it live as you type. Paste an essay, an article draft, or an email and you'll instantly see the sentence total alongside words, characters, paragraphs, how many of your sentences are questions or exclamations, and the average sentence length — the single most useful number for judging how readable your writing is.
Counting sentences is trickier than it sounds, because a period doesn't always end one. This tool knows that Dr. Smith, e.g., 9.30, and U.S. are not sentence boundaries, so the total you get reflects how a human would actually read the text, not just how many dots it contains. Everything runs in your browser — nothing you paste is ever uploaded.
.txt file onto it, or click Sample text to see it in action.Most style guides put comfortable prose somewhere between 15 and 20 words per sentence on average. Individual sentences can and should vary — rhythm comes from the mix — but when the average creeps past 25, text starts to feel like work to read. The breakdown makes the culprits obvious: look for the red badges, split those sentences in two, and watch the average fall.
Need the full word-level picture? Try our Word Counter, count syllables with the Syllable Counter, or see which words you repeat most with the Word Frequency Counter.
A sentence ends at a period, question mark, exclamation point, or ellipsis — but only when it really is the end. The counter skips decimals like 9.30, common abbreviations like Dr., etc., and e.g., initials like John F. Kennedy, and periods followed by a lowercase word, so abbreviations mid-sentence don't inflate your count.
Most simple counters just count dots, so text with abbreviations or decimal numbers produces inflated totals. This tool applies the same judgment a careful reader would, which usually means a slightly lower — and more accurate — number. Unusual formatting can still fool any automatic counter, so treat the total as a very close estimate.
For general writing, an average of 15 to 20 words per sentence reads comfortably. Academic writing often runs a little longer, and marketing copy shorter. If your average is over 25, the color-coded breakdown will show you exactly which sentences to split.
Yes — switch on "Treat line breaks as sentence ends" and every non-empty line counts as one sentence. That's handy for bullet lists, subtitles, song lyrics, and poetry where punctuation doesn't mark the boundaries.
No hard limit. The analysis runs locally in your browser, so even long documents are handled instantly; the breakdown list shows the first 300 sentences to keep the page fast, while the counts always cover the whole text.
Yes. Everything is calculated in your browser with JavaScript. Your text is never sent to a server, stored, or logged, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded.