Academic Word Counter
Count only the words that count toward your limit — toggle references, citations, footnotes, appendices, and captions in or out to match your university's rules.
The word counter in Word or Google Docs counts everything on the page — your bibliography, your footnotes, the text inside your tables. But that's almost never the number your department checks against. CountMyPaper separates the prose that counts from the parts that don't, so the figure you see is the figure you'll be marked on.
⚠️ Why a regular word counter gives you the wrong number
Most universities exclude your reference list from the word count, and many also exclude footnotes, appendices, tables, and quoted material. Word and Google Docs don't know any of that — they count the lot. So the number in your status bar can run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of words over the real total. Trust it and you risk a penalty for breaching the limit, or you cut perfectly good prose you didn't need to lose.
🎛️ You decide what gets counted
CountMyPaper breaks your paper down section by section and lets you switch each part in or out with a single toggle:
- Reference lists, bibliographies, and works-cited pages
- In-text citations, whether author-date (Smith, 2021) or numbered [12]
- Footnotes, endnotes, and headers
- Appendices and supplementary materials
- Tables, figures, and their captions
Because each part is laid out separately, you can see exactly what's being counted and what isn't, then set it to match whatever your handbook or your journal's submission guidelines actually say.
Free, no sign-up, and your text stays in your browser.