Theword count is the number ofwords in a document or passage of text. Word counting may be needed when a text is required to stay within certain numbers of words. This may particularly be the case in academia, legal proceedings,journalism andadvertising. Word count is commonly used bytranslators to determine the price of a translation job. Word counts may also be used to calculate measures ofreadability and to measure typing and reading speeds (usually inwords per minute). When convertingcharacter counts to words, a measure of five or six characters to a word is generally used for English.[1]
Modernweb browsers support word counting viaextensions, via aJavaScriptbookmarklet, or ascript that is hosted in a website. Mostword processors can also count words.Unix-like systems include a program,wc, specifically for word counting. There are a wide variety of word counting tools available online.Different word counting programs may give varying results, depending on thetext segmentation rule details. The exact number of words often is not a strict requirement; thus the variation is acceptable.
According to Chris Pratley of Microsoft, word count is an example of how product reviews are subjective and reflect their authors' biases. It is a feature that most users do not need, he wrote, except students and professional writers. Reviewers also use word count, thus software reviews mentioning the feature as vital to a word processor.[2]
NovelistJane Smiley suggests that length is an important quality of thenovel.[3] However, novels can vary tremendously in length; Smiley lists novels as typically being between 100,000 and 175,000 words,[4] whileNational Novel Writing Month requires its novels to be at least 50,000 words. There are no firm rules: for example, the boundary between anovella and anovel is arbitrary and a literary work may be difficult to categorise.[5] But while the length of a novel is mainly dependent on its writer,[6] lengths may also vary by subgenre; manychapter books for children start at a length of about 16,000 words,[7] and a typical mystery novel might be in the 60,000 to 80,000 word range while a thriller could be well over 100,000 words.[8]
TheScience Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America specifies word lengths for each category of itsNebula Award categories:[9]
| Classification | Word count |
|---|---|
| Novel | 40,000 words or over |
| Novella | 17,500 to 39,999 words |
| Novelette | 7,500 to 17,499 words |
| Short story | up to 7,500 words |
The acceptable length of an academicdissertation varies greatly, dependent predominantly on the subject. Numerous American universities limit Ph.D. dissertations to 100,000 words, barring special permission for exceeding this limit.[10]
A novelist doesn't write to space, of course; 80,000 words, 100,000, it is up to the writer to say when the story is done..
no one wants more than 60-80,000 words in a mystery, 110,000 for a thriller.