How we can do word Counting in IELTS 2023-2024

 

Many students who are to appear for the IELTS exam seem confused about the word counting in IELTS. It can be because of the wrong information provided on the internet.

Also, there are certain myths revolving around this matter like you can’t write more than 250 words in IELTS writing task 2 or in IELTS writing task 1 you need to write more than 200 words to achieve a high band score.

To provide you some clarity, below-mentioned are the word count rules in IELTS.

1. Big or small, every word counts. All the small words such as articles (a, an, the) and prepositions (eg: on, in, at) are also counted.
2. All the hyphenated words such as state-of-the-art, self-improvement, fine-tune are considered as 1 word.
3. Dates, time and number are also considered as a word. For example- the sentence, “There were 5000 people present in the auditorium at 6:30 pm on 25.12.2019.” has 12 words, where ‘5000’, ‘6:30 pm’ and ’25.12.2019’ are considered as three different words too.
4. The symbols written along with numbers are not counted. For example- the % sign in 99.9% is not counted whereas 99.9 is counted as a word.
5. Compound nouns (the nouns that are joined together to make a single word) are counted as one word only. For example- the words skyscraper, grandmother, grasshopper are counted as one word.
6. There are also various compound words that are separated with a hyphen like a mother-in-law, this is also counted as one word. On the other hand compound nouns that are written separately like training room, fire drill, swimming pool are counted as separate words.

For example- the sentence, “The bookkeeper stacked the books neatly in the university library.” has 10 words.

7. The dates that are written in the way ‘14th November’ is counted as one number and one word and not as a single word.
8. All the words, even the ones written in brackets are counted. Also, some people get confused that if words such as ‘the’ are used several times in a sentence, will all of them be counted? Yes, regardless of how many times a word is repeated in a sentence, it is counted.
9. Last but not least, contractions such as I’m, it’s, we’d, we’ll are counted as one word. Whereas, I am, it is, we would, we will are counted as two separate words. It is advisable to not use too many contractions in IELTS writing.