How to Check Word Count in Microsoft Word

The Always-Visible Count

Microsoft Word displays a live word count in the status bar at the bottom-left of the window, visible by default in every version of Word from the last decade or more. This number updates continuously while typing, with no menu to open and no action required to see it. If the status bar has been hidden or customized to exclude it, right-clicking anywhere on the status bar brings up a list of toggleable items, including "Word Count."

Getting the Full Breakdown

Clicking directly on the word count figure in the status bar — or going to Review → Word Count in the ribbon — opens a dialog with the complete breakdown: pages, words, characters (with and without spaces), paragraphs, and lines. This is the same information as the status bar's single number, expanded into every measurement Word tracks.

The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Shift+G on Windows opens this same dialog directly, without needing to click the status bar or navigate the ribbon.

Selection Changes What's Counted

The word count shown — both in the status bar and in the full dialog — reflects the entire document only when no text is selected. The moment any text is highlighted, Word switches to showing the count for that selection specifically, displayed as "X of Y words," where Y is the total document count. This dual display is actually more explicit than some other word processors, since the "of Y" portion keeps the full document total visible even while a partial selection is active.

This makes Word slightly less prone to the "forgot a selection was active" mistake that affects tools with a less explicit selection indicator — but it's still worth knowing that clicking anywhere to deselect, before checking a whole-document count, guarantees the number reflects the entire file rather than whatever was last selected.

What Gets Included, and What Doesn't

Footnotes and endnotes are included in the count by default in most versions of Word — a difference from some other word processors, which exclude them unless specifically configured otherwise. For documents where footnote content is substantial (academic papers, in particular), this means Word's count may run higher than the count from a tool that excludes footnotes by default.

Text inside text boxes is not included in the standard word count. A document with body text plus several text boxes containing captions, callouts, or sidebars will show a word count that reflects only the body text — the text box content needs to be counted separately, either by selecting it directly or by checking it independently.

Headers and footers are excluded from the main word count unless the cursor is specifically placed inside the header or footer area when the count is checked — in which case Word shows a count for that section alone, separate from the body.

Word's count is precise about what it's counting — the inconsistency people run into is usually about which part of a document has content that lives outside the main body text, and therefore outside the default count, without realizing it.

Real-Time Count vs. Final Check

Because the status bar count updates continuously, most Word users rely on it as a running total during drafting rather than a final check performed once at the end. This works well for tracking progress against a target, but it's worth doing one explicit final check — via the full dialog, not just glancing at the status bar — before submitting or publishing a document, specifically to confirm that footnotes, text boxes, or headers aren't creating a gap between the visible number and the document's actual total content.

Checking Word Count Without Opening Word

For text that isn't in a Word document — a draft being written directly in an email, a passage copied from a PDF, a piece of text from any other source — opening Word just to check its length is unnecessary overhead. Pasting the text into a standalone word counter gives an instant count without needing a Word document to exist in the first place, and works identically whether the text originated in Word, Google Docs, a plain text file, or anywhere else.

This is also the more practical option when comparing several draft versions of the same short passage — pasting each version in turn is faster than switching between multiple open Word documents to compare their individual counts.

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Microsoft Word's word count is about as accessible as a word count gets — always visible, one click from a full breakdown. The occasional surprise comes from content that lives outside the main body (footnotes, text boxes, headers) rather than from the count itself being wrong. Knowing which parts of a document fall inside or outside the default count is what turns an occasionally confusing number into a reliably useful one.