Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here: Counting Document Lines.
Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated April 7, 2026)
This tip applies to Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021
Word provides a tool you can use to return simple statistics about your document. One of the statistics it can provide is the number of lines in your document. In order to see how many lines there are in your document, display the Review tab of the ribbon and click the Word Count tool in the Proofing group. After a short delay (depending on the size of your document and the speed of your computer), Word displays the Word Count dialog box. (See Figure 1.)
Figure 1. The Word Count dialog box.
One of the statistics provided in the Word Count dialog box is Lines. The value returned by Word depends on several things. First, it obviously depends on the formatting of your document. For instance, if you decrease the point size of text within your document, that can affect the line count. Second, the printer driver you are using can affect the number of lines in your document. In both instances, the differences are due to the different ways in which Word "flows" your text in the document. When the point size is smaller, Word can fit more characters on each given line, thereby reducing the overall number of lines required to present the same information. Likewise, using a different printer driver could result in a slightly different rendering of a font. For instance, the same font may appear more "compressed" on one printer than on another. This, again, means different amounts of information per line and a potentially different line count.
Finally, hidden text can affect the line count returned in the Word Count dialog box. If you have the printing of hidden text turned off, Word doesn't count hidden text in the line count. If you want it to be considered, make sure you configure Word to print hidden text.
WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (12688) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Counting Document Lines.
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2026-04-08 09:19:51
Timothy J. McGowan
Hmm... I was very wrong: There is a Sentences collection. However, Word has to make assumptions about where a sentence ends.
With no text selected, click in a paragraph, and Word selects what it thinks is the sentence you clicked in. Testing it with that mock sentence I wrote yesterday, Word recognizes these eight sentences:
At 1:45 p.m.
I have an appointment with Dr.
I.
T.
Jones; in my hometown, we have a family entertainment center called Wow!
Zone; you might own some Yu-Gi-Oh!
manga or trading cards; and What About Bob?
starred Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss.
Even putting "What About Bob?" in quotation marks, still followed by the lowercase "starred," didn't help Word recognize that the question mark was not the end of the sentence.
If we English writers would start using explicit, unique end-of-sentence markers, then computers could count sentences for us. Till then...
2026-04-07 09:11:10
Timothy J. McGowan
@Bas:
Word does not have a built-in way to count sentences. We don't use unique end-of-sentence markers.
For instance: At 1:45 p.m. I have an appointment with Dr. I. T. Jones; in my hometown, we have a family entertainment center called Wow! Zone; you might own some Yu-Gi-Oh! manga or trading cards; and What About Bob? starred Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss.
Highly contrived, of course, but any part of that one sentence can easily occur in everyday writing. We signal to Word that a paragraph ends because we press Enter. We don't signal the ends of our sentences in any consistent, unique way. So, Word can count paragraphs but not sentences.
Perhaps with more AI cooked in, it might be able to in the future. But it's possible to write sentences that are entirely vague: It's at 8 a.m. I start working today.
That can be read as two sentences or one, especially for the type of author who drops their thats from sentences: It's at 8 a.m. that I start working today.
2026-04-07 05:48:09
Bas
I am using Word (Office) 2021 Windows 11.
The statistics available, in the above, do not include a sentence count. Is this a difficult cont to produce?
I would like to get a count for the number of 'sentences' in a document and compare it with the number of long sentences (another Word.Tip).
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Please Note:
This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and 2021. If you are using an earlier version (Word 2003 or earlier), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for earlier versions of Word, click here:
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