How does it decide what counts as a word?

A word is a run of Finnish letters and digits with internal hyphens and apostrophes kept inside. The counter splits on whitespace and punctuation, so a long compound like talossanikaan counts as one word.

Are long Finnish compounds one word or several?

One. Finnish is agglutinative and forms long single words by stacking case and possessive suffixes and by compounding, as in talossanikaan or lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas. With no internal spaces, each counts as exactly one word.

Does it recognise ä, ö, and å?

Yes. The Finnish vowels ä and ö, and the Swedish-Finnish å, are Unicode letters, so they are counted as word characters and never treated as separators.

How are hyphenated forms handled?

A hyphen with no surrounding spaces, as in EU-maa or osta-myy, keeps the form as one word. A spaced dash used as punctuation separates the words on either side.

How are sentences counted?

Sentences are counted by runs of terminal punctuation (. ! ? and the ellipsis …). Consecutive terminators collapse to one boundary, so an ellipsis or ?! does not inflate the count.

Finnish Word Counter

Finnish is strongly agglutinative: a single word can carry several case and possessive suffixes and combine multiple stems into one long compound, such as talossanikaan (“not even in my house”) or the textbook lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas. Each of these is one orthographic word. This counter applies the right boundary rules so compounds stay whole and you get accurate word, character, and sentence totals.

How it works

The algorithm treats a word as a maximal run of letters and digits with internal hyphens and apostrophes allowed:

It matches [\p{L}\p{N}] runs, permitting an internal - or ' between two such characters.
The Finnish vowels ä and ö, plus å, are Unicode letters and count as word characters.
A hyphen inside a word, as in EU-maa, keeps the form as one word; a spaced dash used as punctuation separates words.

Characters are counted two ways: every character including spaces, and the length with whitespace removed. Sentences are counted by collapsing runs of terminal punctuation (., !, ?, …) so an ellipsis or a ?! combo counts as one boundary.

Example

The text:

Hän asuu talossanikaan… Eikö niin?

contains four words: Hän, asuu, talossanikaan, and Eikö (niin makes five). The long compound talossanikaan is counted as a single word because it has no internal spaces.

Notes

Mixed Finnish-English text and Latin product names are counted sensibly because Latin letters are also word characters.
Numbers like 2026 count as one word; a number glued to a suffix with a hyphen, such as 2020-luku, stays one compound word.

Finnish Word Counter

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How it works

Example

Notes