The Indonesian Word Counter tallies words in Bahasa Indonesia while correctly handling one feature that trips up generic counters: reduplication. In Indonesian, doubling a root with a hyphen — like buku-buku (books) or anak-anak (children) — forms a single word, not two. This free tool counts your text accurately and instantly, entirely in the browser.
How it works
The counter splits your text on whitespace into tokens. Each token has its leading and trailing punctuation removed, but any internal hyphen is kept. A token is classified as reduplication when it has the shape X-X (full doubling, e.g. mata-mata) or X-Xan / X-X... where the second half extends the first (e.g. buah-buahan, fruits). Each such token is counted as exactly one word, matching how Indonesian grammar treats kata ulang.
Words joined by affixes — membaca (reads), perpustakaan (library) — are already single tokens because Indonesian affixes attach without spaces, so they count as one word automatically.
Example
The sentence Anak-anak membaca buku-buku contains three words: anak-anak, membaca, and buku-buku. A naive counter that splits on hyphens would report five — this tool reports three and flags anak-anak and buku-buku as reduplicated.
Tips
- Paste long passages freely; counting stays instant because it runs locally.
- Use the reduplication list to spot doubled forms you may want to vary for style.
- Pair this with the Indonesian Reading Time Estimator to turn the word count into a reading duration.