How does it decide what counts as a word?

A word is a run of Swedish letters and digits with internal hyphens and apostrophes kept inside. The counter splits on whitespace and punctuation, so words like förälder, kött, and sjöräddning are counted correctly.

Are å, ä, ö treated as letters?

Yes. The Swedish vowels å, ä, and ö are full Unicode letters and distinct letters of the Swedish alphabet, so the counter treats them as word characters and never as separators or punctuation.

Are long Swedish compounds one word or several?

One. Swedish writes compounds as a single word, like sjöräddningshelikopter or järnvägsstation. With no internal spaces, each compound counts as exactly one word.

How are hyphenated forms handled?

A hyphen with no surrounding spaces, as in TV-program or 90-tal, 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.

Swedish Word Counter

Swedish adds three vowels — å, ä, and ö — that are distinct letters of the alphabet, not accented variants. A counter must classify them as letters so a word like förälder or sjöräddning is never split at a diacritic. Swedish also writes compounds as one long word, so spacing rules matter. This tool applies the correct boundary rules and reports 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 Swedish vowels å, ä, and ö are Unicode letters and count as word characters.
A hyphen inside a word, as in TV-program or 90-tal, 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:

En sjöräddningshelikopter flög… Eller hur? TV-program.

contains the words En, sjöräddningshelikopter, flög, Eller, hur, TV-program — six words. The long compound stays one word, and the hyphen keeps TV-program whole.

Notes

Mixed Swedish-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 by a hyphen, such as 90-tal, stays one compound word.

Swedish Word Counter

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How it works

Example

Notes