1) Is there a minimum word limit for a PhD? usually in my area its said 80,000. so for e.g. if I write around 60,000 would that be a Masters or MPhil level? just panicking as submission is near:-(

2) How does the word count work? with or without references?

There can be rough guidelines in different departments, but even those can be ignored. My department expected 80-100,000 words. I came in at 70,000. I passed.

Word counts include footnotes but not the bibliography at the end.

And I was told time and again that it's quality not quantity that counts, and that supervisors much prefer too short theses to too long ones.

I sought a lot of advice about this, from my supervisors and other academics. I was given advice on how to make my thesis look more weighty. But ultimately it was still well short, but ok.

My department (in social sciences) has a 75k-100k guideline. That said, I know at least three people who submitted near the 50k mark (one more like 45k!) and they all passed fine. It's the quality and coverage that count.

it's an absolute max of 80,000 in mine I think, and I have been told also if you can make it shorter go for it! Shorter, but still good! Reading anything concise is much better than reading waffle that's saying the same thing.

Sheena, this depends entirely on your universities regulations! You need to obtaina copy of (if you haven't already) your universities regulations for PhD/MPhil degrees where the limit will be stated. At my uni, for instance, PhD is between 80-100k, and MPhil is between 60-80k. At another university (where a friend of mine is doing his PhD) however, the PhD is 60-80k and the Mphil is 40-50k. Also, university regulations usually state different word limits for different disciplines - e.g. arts, engineering and sciences have shorter words limits (for obvious reasons) than humanities and social sciences. So you really need to check your university regulations and if it's too vague (e.g. it says 'approx. 80k') then you need to double check with your supervisor. People on this forum can't help you since we are all doing different disciplines at different uni's.

Thank you to all the replies. I will confirm with graduate school & supervisor. I have calmed down a bit now so thinking more clearly.:$