Counting the number of occurrences of a word in Microsoft Word

If you want to know the number of times a particular word has been used in your document in Microsoft Word, this little trick will help you. In fact, this trick will be handy even if you want to find out the number of occurrences of a word only in a part of the document. Moreover, it will work for all versions of Word.

To do this, proceed as under:

(1) Start Microsoft Word and open the document. It is advantageous to first save the document, so that in case some mistake occurs accidentally you can simply close the document discarding the changes. If you want to be doubly-cautious, keep an extra saved copy of the document.

(2) If you want to count the occurrences of a word in only a part of the document, then select (i.e., highlight) that part with your mouse / keyboard. Otherwise, if you want to count the word occurrences in the full document, just ignore this step.

(3) Now, open the Find and Replace dialog box either by pressing Ctrl + H keys together or by clicking on Replace command in the Edit menu. Enter the word you want to count in the Find what field as well as in the Replace with field. Take care to enter the same word in both the Find what field and Replace with field. For example, see the following figure where I am counting the number of occurrences of the word “want”:

(4) Now, in the Find and Replace dialog box, click on the Replace All button. Word will replace all occurrences of the selected word in the Find what field with the word in the Replace with field. However, since we’ve have used the same word for both the Find what field and Replace with field, our document remains the same. But, the advantage is that after the replacement operation is over, Word will tell us as to how many replacements have been made. And, this is the word count for the selected word! See, the following dialog box informing us that 8 replacements have been made by Word in the document, so the count of occurrences of the word “want” in this document is 8.

(5) Now, you can close this document discarding the changes made, i.e., without saving the changes made. Since we had already saved the document before we started this exercise, our document remains intact.

That’s it! Now, you’ve the count for the occurrences of the word in the document.

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