The quickest way
Open the PDF Word Counter and drop the PDF onto it. It reads the text of every page in your browser and shows the words, characters with and without spaces, sentences, pages and reading time, with a table of words per page. The file is not uploaded anywhere.
With Microsoft Word
Word on Windows can open a PDF directly (File, Open), converting it into an editable document. The word count then appears in the status bar at the bottom of the window. The conversion can split or merge some lines, and complex layouts may not come through cleanly, but the count is usually close.
By copying the text
Select all the text in a PDF viewer (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A), copy it and paste it into the Word Counter. This works for short documents, but some viewers copy only the current page, and columns or tables can paste out of order. PDF to Text extracts the text of every page in one go if you want to edit it first.
Why counts differ between tools
- Headers, footers, page numbers and footnotes are counted by tools that read the whole page, and skipped by some word processors.
- Hyphenated words split across lines may count as two.
- Numbers, URLs and symbols count as words in some tools and not in others.
For a word limit, check which of these the limit includes. Removing the reference list or appendix pages from the count is usually expected.
Scanned PDFs
A scanned PDF is a set of pictures of pages, with no text in it, so every counter reports zero words. It needs OCR (text recognition) first; Google Drive can do this by opening the PDF with Google Docs, after which the text can be counted.