What are enclitic particles in Tagalog?

They are short particles like na, nga, ba, pa, raw, daw, din, rin and po that are written as separate words but are grammatically bound to the word before them. They add meaning such as completion, emphasis, questions, or reported speech without standing alone semantically.

Why are there two word counts?

The orthographic count splits on whitespace and counts every written token, so each enclitic particle is its own word — this is the standard count most people expect. The lexical count merges enclitics into their host word, giving a content-word total that some linguistic or readability analyses prefer.

Which count should I use?

For document length, character limits, or matching another word counter, use the orthographic count. For analysing the number of distinct content words, use the merged lexical count. Both are shown so you can choose.

How are sentences counted?

Sentences are counted by runs of terminal punctuation — periods, question marks and exclamation marks. This is an approximation, since abbreviations and decimals can contain periods, but it is reliable for ordinary prose.

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Tagalog Word Counter

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Counting Tagalog words, particles included

A plain word counter splits on spaces and calls it done. That works for English, but Tagalog sprinkles short enclitic particles — na, nga, ba, pa, raw, daw — that are written separately yet attach to the word before them. This tool gives you both the standard orthographic count and a particle-aware lexical count so the number means what you intend.

How it works

The counter tokenizes the text on whitespace and keeps only tokens that contain at least one letter or digit. From there it produces two figures:

Orthographic words is simply the number of word tokens — the count generic tools report, and the one to use for length limits.
Lexical words walks the tokens and, whenever a token (other than the first) is a known enclitic particle, attaches it to the previous word instead of counting it separately.

It also reports the number of enclitic particles detected, an approximate sentence count from terminal punctuation, and the character total without spaces.

Tips and example

For example, Kumain na ba kayo is four orthographic words but only two lexical content words once na and ba merge onto Kumain. The particle list covers the common bound forms (na, nga, ba, pa, raw, daw, din, rin, po, ho, lang, naman, kasi, and others). For character-level counting that respects the ng digraph, use the companion Tagalog Character Counter.