Spanish Word Counter

Paste Spanish text and read words (palabras), characters (caracteres) and sentences (oraciones), with ñ and ¿ counted once each.

Spanish Word Counter

Sample text. Type or paste to replace it.

Words (palabras)
27
Characters (caracteres)
138
Without spaces (sin espacios)
112
Sentences (oraciones)
4
Paragraphs (párrafos)
1
Lines (líneas)
1
Letters (letras)
104
Punctuation (signos de puntuación)
7
Detached accents (tildes sueltas)
0
Bytes in UTF-8 (tamaño en bytes)
144

More options a limit for words (palabras)

Next step Pasted from a PDF? Take the line breaks outType á, ñ and ¿ on a keyboard without them

How it works

This Spanish word counter shows 10 counts, labelled in both languages, from words (palabras) to bytes. An accented letter, ñ, and the opening ¿ each count once.

Read the full guide

Paste, read, copy

The box opens on a sample: 27 palabras, 138 caracteres and 4 oraciones. Paste your own text over it and the ten numbers change as you type. A task set as entre 150 y 180 palabras needs the upper figure in Limit for words (palabras).

Word counter Spanish rules

Del and al are one word each, and so is devuélvesela (give it back to her). The Real Academia Española groups long numbers in threes with spaces, so 1 000 000 counts as three words. The opening ¿ and ¡ add a character each and never a word.

Tips
  • If Detached accents (tildes sueltas) is above 0, some accents are separate characters: a form counting code points finds more.
  • Ask which caracteres a limit means. Characters (caracteres) and Without spaces (sin espacios) are 26 apart on the sample.

Questions and answers

Do del and al count as one word or two?

One each. They are the two contractions Spanish requires, de plus el and a plus el. Pronouns attached to a verb behave the same way: dímelo and haciéndolo count once. If a teacher counts devuélvesela as three, that rule is theirs, so ask first.

Why does another counter give a different number?

Counters disagree on what a word is. Here it is anything between spaces, or long dashes, that holds a letter or digit. So 20 %, an email address and teórico-práctico count once each, and a lone dash is none. Another tool may split at the hyphen.

Why is the sentence count higher than mine?

A sentence ends at a full stop, ? or ! and at every line break, so a pasted PDF counts each printed line. Sr., Sra., Ud., Srta., Sres. and p. ej. never end one here, and EE. UU. only before a capital letter. Other languages: word counters.

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What the 10 counts mean

Length, the numbers a limit is set in 3

  • Characters (caracteres) Each á, ñ and ü is one character however it was typed, because the tool counts what the eye sees and not the pieces underneath. ¿ and ¡ are one each too, so a Spanish question is one character longer than the same question with only a closing mark. Every space and line break counts as well.
  • Without spaces (sin espacios) The number to read when a form or a brief says sin espacios: every space, tab and line break is taken out, the no-break kind too. In a single paragraph of ordinary prose it is smaller than the count above by the number of words minus one.
  • Words (palabras) Del and al are one word each, and so is devuélvesela, a verb with two pronouns attached to it: a word here is whatever stands between two spaces, or two long dashes, and holds a letter or a digit. A hyphen does not split: teórico-práctico is one. A number grouped with spaces, 1 000 000, counts as three, and a question mark typed with a space on each side is not a word.
Show all 10 counts (7 more)

Structure 3

  • Lines (líneas) Every line, blank ones included, so it is never smaller than the paragraph count. Fourteen verses typed as four stanzas with a blank line between stanzas show 17 lines and 14 paragraphs. A line break left at the very end of the text adds one more line.
  • Paragraphs (párrafos) Every line that has something on it. A blank line is not counted, so a heading, a body paragraph and a signature make three. Text copied from a PDF often carries a break at the end of every printed line, and then this number is the count of printed lines and the sentence count is inflated with it.
  • Sentences (oraciones) A sentence ends at a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark, and at a line break. The opening ¿ and ¡ never end one. Sr., Sra., Dr., Dra., Ud. and Uds. are read as abbreviations, and this page adds Srta., Srtas., Sres., p. ej. and EE. UU., so none of them splits a sentence. Two faults remain. EE. UU. straight before a name, as in EE. UU. Ana Ruiz, adds a sentence that is not there, and a sentence that ends on Ud., Uds. or ej. runs into the one after it. Three dots followed by a small letter do not end one.

What the text is made of 2

  • Letters (letras) Letters only: no digits, spaces or punctuation. ñ is a letter of its own, which is what makes the Spanish alphabet 27 letters long. ch and ll were once treated as single letters and are counted here as two each, the way they have been alphabetised since 1994. The ordinal signs in 1.º and 2.ª are letters to Unicode (U+00BA and U+00AA), so each adds one.
  • Punctuation (signos de puntuación) Every punctuation character. Spanish opens a question or an exclamation as well as closing it, so ¿Quién? holds two marks: U+00BF inverted question mark and U+003F question mark. ¡ is U+00A1 inverted exclamation mark. The angle quotes « and » count one each. An aside set between two long dashes (U+2014) adds two marks and no words: a dash is never part of a word, even closed up to one.

How the text is stored 2

  • Bytes in UTF-8 (tamaño en bytes) Every á, é, í, ó, ú, ü, ñ, ¿ and ¡ takes two bytes once the text is saved as UTF-8, and plain a to z, digits, spaces and full stops take one, so Spanish runs a few bytes longer than its character count. It is the number to watch when a field is limited in bytes and not in characters.
  • Detached accents (tildes sueltas) Accents stored as a separate character after the letter: U+0301 combining acute accent, U+0303 combining tilde and U+0308 combining diaeresis. Typed Spanish normally shows 0 here, because á, ñ and ü each exist as one ready-made character. Any other number means the text came from somewhere that splits them, and a field that counts code points will find it longer than it looks.

How this list was compiled: Own work. The 10 counts are the ones this page shows, picked for what a Spanish brief or form asks for (palabras, caracteres, caracteres sin espacios) and for what Spanish text does to a counter. Every example in a note was run through the counter this page uses, with the language set to Spanish and the short forms this page adds (Srta, Srtas, Sres, ej, EE), on 2026-09-20, and a note went in only when the result matched. Character names, code points and categories: https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt, version 18.0.0. The 27 letters, the former single letters ch and ll and their alphabetising since 1994, and the angle quotes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography. The opening question and exclamation marks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_question_and_exclamation_marks. The contractions al and del: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraction_(grammar). Pronouns attached to the verb: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_object_pronouns. Digits grouped in threes with spaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator. Long dashes round an aside, closed up to the words inside: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash. One, two and three byte ranges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8. How the browser finds sentences and characters: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl/Segmenter. Those checked 2026-09-19. The short forms Srta. and Srtas.: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Srta. The form Sres.: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sres. The forms p. ej. and EE. UU., the doubled letters of a plural, and Ud., Uds.: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abreviatura. These three checked 2026-09-20. Licence: own work