The word count is the number of 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 and advertising. Word count is commonly used by to determine the price of a translation job. Word counts may also be used to calculate measures of readability and to measure typing and reading speeds (usually in words per minute). When converting character counts to words, a measure of five or six characters to a word is generally used for English.[.]
Software
Modern
support word counting via extensions, via a
JavaScript bookmarklet, or a script that is hosted in a website. Most
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 the text segmentation rule details. The exact number of words often is not a strict requirement, thus the variation is acceptable.
In fiction
Novelist
Jane Smiley suggests that length is an important quality of the
novel.
[Smiley, Jane. 2005. Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, p. 14.] However, novels can vary tremendously in length; Smiley lists novels as typically being between 100,000 and 175,000 words,
[Smiley, 2005, p. 15.] while National Novel Writing Month requires its novels to be at least 50,000 words. There are no firm rules: for example, the boundary between a
novella and a
novel is arbitrary and a literary work may be difficult to categorise.
[Edge, Tom, "Does Size Matter?" The Guardian (UK), Booksblog, Nov. 2, 2006. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2006/nov/02/doessizematter] But while the length of a novel is mainly dependent on its writer,
[.] lengths may also vary by subgenre; many
for children start at a length of about 16,000 words,
[Lamb, Nancy, Crafting Stories for Children. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, p. 24] 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.
[.]
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America specifies word lengths for each category of its Nebula Award categories:[
]
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> SFWA Awards FAQ, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America as follows:
|
|
| 40,000 words or over |
| 17,500 to 39,999 words |
| 7,500 to 17,499 words |
| up to 7,500 words |
In non-fiction
The acceptable length of an academic
dissertation 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.
[.]
See also
Sources
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.
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An article on the relative importance of various word count methods in fiction publishing.
