How does it decide what counts as a word?

A word is a run of Cyrillic or Latin letters and digits, with internal hyphens and apostrophes kept inside the word. The counter splits on whitespace, em-dashes, en-dashes, and punctuation, so что-то counts as one word but слово — слово counts as two.

Are hyphenated compounds one word or two?

One. Russian compounds joined by a hyphen, such as кто-то, по-русски, or нью-йоркский, are single lexical words, so the counter keeps them together. A spaced dash used as punctuation, however, separates words.

How are em-dashes and en-dashes handled?

An em-dash or en-dash surrounded by spaces is treated as punctuation and does not join words. A plain hyphen with no spaces is treated as part of a compound word. This matches normal Russian typography.

Does it count characters too?

Yes. The tool reports total characters, characters excluding spaces, words, and sentences, so you can check both word and character limits for posts, abstracts, or assignments.

How are sentences counted?

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

Russian Word Counter

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Counting words in Russian needs more care than a naive space split. Russian typography uses the em-dash heavily as punctuation, while hyphens join genuine compound words like кто-то and по-русски. This counter applies the correct boundary rules so compounds stay whole, dashes-as-punctuation split words, 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.
A hyphen inside a word (no surrounding spaces) keeps the compound as one word: что-то, нью-йоркский.
An em-dash — or en-dash –, which in Russian is almost always set off with spaces, falls outside the word pattern and therefore separates the words on either side.

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 that an ellipsis or a ?! combo counts as a single sentence boundary.

Example

The text:

Кто-то сказал: «Привет» — и ушёл.

contains the words Кто-то, сказал, Привет, и, ушёл — five words. The compound Кто-то stays as one word, while the spaced em-dash does not merge Привет and и.

Notes

The Latin-letter allowance means mixed Russian-English text and Latin product names are also counted sensibly.
Numbers like 2026 count as one word; a number glued to a unit by a hyphen, such as 5-летний, stays a single compound word as Russian expects.